“Michel Brault's Les Ordres (is) a very sound film of protest from Canada. The central event here is the Governmental panic of October 1970, when kidnappings in Québec precipitated the invocation of the War Measures Act, and several hundred French Canadian citizens were carted off to jail for no good reason. Brault concentrates on five of the victims, and especially Clermont Boudreau, a discontented union organiser in a textile mill. The performance, by the lugubrious Jean Lapointe (in other contexts a broad comedian), is so well pitched at that grumbling sick-of-the-system level which unites industrial employees of all nations, that the indignity of his experience points to something more serious than an isolated failure of nerve on the part of one Government: namely the impulse towards self-preservation shown by all political systems, whatever the cost to their people.” --Russell Davies, The Observer.
Brault, who shared the Best Director Award at Cannes for this film, has been one of the leading figures in the Québec Cinema movement since its beginnings in the early 1950s and has long been recognised as Canada's leading cinéma-vérité cameraman.