Claude Jutra's Mon Oncle Antoine is the most honored Canadian film ever made, critics and audiences alike agreeing with Pauline Kael's assessment: “a film of love and intelligence--it is beautiful enough to be compared to the finest work ever done in the medium.” The story is of a young boy coming of age in a backwoods asbestos town in Quebec before the days of miners' unions. The nerve center of this economically depressed area is the general store owned by the boy's uncle Antoine, where the boy acts as occasional helper. Uncle Antoine is a gentle teacher, but circumstances conspire to thrust the boy into unanticipated situations, including a brush with death, that force him to learn more than he might have wanted to know about growing up.