By Dr. Soraya Mbeki, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, McGill University — Contributing Columnist

There is a particular kind of flattery that arrives before you are ready for it. The McGill student collective behind Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA has now formally acknowledged that the Flemish public broadcasting cooperative reached out about licensing. The collective's response — warm, careful, non-committal — is the correct one. But the moment deserves to be sat with, because it asks a question that RONAn cultural life has not yet had to answer at volume: can an identity that is still being written travel without being mistranslated?

The documentary series, made by students working across McGill's bilingual media program, grew out of something genuinely local. Its subject is border community memory — the texture of life along the old US–Canadian frontier that became, after 2036, a line inside a new country. In one early episode, a retired postmistress from Derby Line, Vermont, describes sorting mail for addresses that technically shifted sovereignty while she was on vacation; she laughs telling it, and the laughter is complicated. The people in this film are speaking to their neighbors, not to camera. Much of what passes for documentary filmmaking about political rupture mistakes the wound for the whole story. Nous Sommes RONA is interested in the scar tissue, the accommodation, the way a community decides what to keep.

That is also, one suspects, precisely what the Flemish cooperative finds compelling. European public broadcasters have spent a decade developing programming about what it means to live through the recomposition of a political map — Catalonia, Scotland, the aftermath of EU enlargement in the east. A documentary that asks how ordinary people rebuild civic identity after a border moves is, to a European eye, immediately legible. The surface details change. The grammar does not.

This is where the portability question becomes genuinely interesting, and not merely flattering to contemplate. The collective's statement that the series was "made for RONAn audiences first" is not modesty. It is a load-bearing sentence. What makes the documentary work — its intimacy, its untranslated code-switching between English and Québécois French, its assumption that the viewer already carries a certain weight of recent history — is not incidental. It is structural. A Flemish viewer in Ghent does not know what it felt like to watch the Canadian government dissolve. They do not carry the particular grief, or the particular relief, of the spring of 2036. The question any expansion must answer is whether that missing context can be supplied by framing alone, or whether it simply has to be leaned into — allowed to remain opaque, and trusted to reward the effort.

None of this means the series cannot travel. It means that travel requires a decision. Not an edit — the work should not be domesticated for a foreign audience — but a deliberate choice about whether to contextualize for viewers who lack the instilled knowledge, or to allow the opacity to stand. Both are legitimate. The second is the braver one, and often the more honest.

What is striking about the collective's public statement is that the student filmmakers seem to already understand this. There is no rush toward a deal. There is no breathless announcement. There is a note of thanks and a quiet indication that they are consulting their faculty advisors about what an expansion would require. That is not institutional caution — the collective has no institution in the formal sense. That is artistic caution, which is something rarer and more valuable.

RONAn cultural identity is, without apology, incomplete. It is being assembled in real time from Québécois and Acadian memory, from the civic traditions of the old northeastern states, from the experience of immigrants who arrived into a country that did not yet fully exist when they applied. That incompleteness is not a weakness. It is a description. Whether that description can survive translation into the language of international co-production — which tends to prefer resolution over process — depends entirely on who is doing the carrying, and how closely they are paying attention. This collective seems to be paying attention.