The Gold Medal 2007

Golden book

As Quebec's delegate to Mexico and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, Henri Dorion realized that his native province was not well known at home or abroad. "Few publications offered a comprehensive view of Quebec, one that might grab the public's interest," he says. The outcome, two decades later, is an ambitious bilingual coffee-table book and DVD on the geography of Quebec.

PHOTO: JOHN BURRIDGE

The DVD/book was published last fall by Communications TerDor Inc. of Saint-Lambert, Que., a small newmedia firm founded in 1999 by Dorion's daughter, Anik Dorion-Coupal, and Clément Thériault. It combines geographic detail, poetic prose and artistic aerial photography and features video and film excerpts, an original soundtrack, cartography and 3-D animation.

"The interpreters of the landscape are not only scientists," says Dorion-Coupal, "but artists, singers and musicians." The next volume, The Inhabited Landscape of Québec/Le Québec habité, about the province's communities, is to be released in the fall.

Monique Roy-Sole