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My Father Was Always a Mystery to Me, Then I Found Out He Was a Cult Leader

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There was always a lingering feeling when we separated from my father. It wasn't explained why all of a sudden we left and my father was gone. It was all a secret. After my father passed away, we received papers from the estate, and then I saw that my father had 15 beneficiaries.

I learned my father had went out and got these really wealthy people, brought them together. Each person had their own story. My father was a master at creating a parallel world for each person. The common belief was that they were all reincarnations of important characters from ancient times. There was Moses, there was Mary Magdalene, there was Judas. Everybody had their own part to play. They believed that the end of the world was coming. I think theft also played a big role in enriching the cult. They were stealing and hiding things away to prepare for the downfall of the world. The police estimated that the theft amounted to over $100,000.

My father was romantically involved with all of the women in the cult, but all of this was kept secret. It all ended in 1982 when there began to be love triangles, and disputes became more and more intense between the members.

My mom wouldn't talk about my father. But you go out in the world, and you start watching films and reading books, and when I started hearing about symptoms of manic depression, bipolar disorder, I started thinking that sort of sounds like my father.

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n paper, there’s nothing particularly unusual about 28-year-old filmmaker Kalina Bertin’s early life.

Born on the Caribbean island of Montserrat to a Québécois mother and American father, she moved to her mother’s native Quebec at age six following her parents’ divorce. It’s really only when her father was murdered in Thailand in 2006 that she uncovered the truth: her father, George Patrick Dubie, was a cult leader and con man who had been fathering children and running cons since the 1970s. In the years following her father’s death, Bertin’s older siblings Félicia and François Sean started exhibiting signs of manic depression. Bertin started drawing a link between her father’s life and her siblings’ struggle with mental illness. Manic, her first film, sees Bertin explore both the past and the present and try to draw a link between both.