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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - There's something Northerners need to talk about.

Quebec Filmmaker Maryse Chartrand is screening a French language documentary about the impact her husband's death had on her family in an effort to break the silence that surrounds depression and suicide.

Maryse Chartrand shares the story about the impact her husband's suicide had on her family in the documentary film Le Voyage d'une Vie. She is screening the film in Yellowknife tonight and will travel to Fort Smith and Hay River later this week. - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

"I'm telling people we have to talk about depression. We have to talk about suicide. We have to talk about the grieving process. It's not shameful," she said. "We have to talk about it. That will help people who are in depressive modes and that will help people who are grieving."

The film, titled Le Voyage d'une Vie, began as a much different project. Maryse and her husband Samuel, along with their three children, travelled around the world for a year collecting footage for a documentary about their global journey as a family.

After they returned, it took a year to find a Quebec television station to commit to buying the project. Two days after a station finally agreed to a deal, Samuel committed suicide.

"When you're in a deep depression like that you can get the best news in the world and it won't change this way of thinking, which is part of the sickness," she said.

After consulting her children, Charland made a new deal with the station. Her film explores the journey she shared with her husband and the journey she is on following his death.

"I did it for my own survival," she said. "I needed to understand what had happened to him and what was happening to us as a family. In producing the film I realized it wasn't marginal. It's a very big social issue."

In Quebec, suicide is the highest cause of death for males aged 17 to 45.

"In the North it's even higher," she said. "I think it's the highest in the world."

Charland incorporated the voices of psychologists and survivors in an effort to share what she has learned with her audiences.

"What I realize is that what is needed the most is to break the silence that surrounds suicide," she said. "The silence that men put themselves into when they don't feel good sometimes doesn't work and if you are clinically depressed, which is a sickness, and you don't react and it gets bad enough you will have suicidal ideas.

"Men commit suicide four times as much as women because they don't get help. They wait too long when they don't feel good because they feel that depression is a sign of weakness. Well, depression is not a sign of weakness - it's a sickness and we need to understand that so people can get help."

Charland's film also communicates the need for the people who love someone who has died from suicide to resist isolating themselves as they grieve because of shame for themselves or for their loved one.

Grieving alone makes healing difficult and the grief more painful, she said.

"In the grieving process what is the most important thing is to talk about it," she said. "To talk about the deceased person, to talk about how you're feeling."

After the Yellowknife screening tonight, she is bringing a bilingual edition of her film to Hay River on Oct. 22 and then to Fort Smith for a screening at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25 in the Northern Lights Museum. These are the first screenings of the film outside of Quebec.