When millworkers in Roberval, a northern Quebec logging town, go on strike, the conflict rips the close-knit community apart, and despite the workers' solidarity, their individual struggles and demands further escalate tensions within the group. They remain united by the desire to escape poverty and exact revenge on their boss, but when Brian Ferland decrees a lockout and awakens in them a buried rage, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashingly cosmopolitan newcomer from Montreal. By day, Querelle walks the picket lines with his cohort, but at night he breaks bottles on the beach and settles scores with baseball bats and the town's privileged young men flock to his apartment for sex. As positions harden and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent.
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