Louise Bourque imbues her 35mm Jours en fleurs (Flowering Days, 2003) with both biographical and biological meaning, in the process offering an example of the relation between human reproduction and the reproduction (and destruction) of cinema. The film takes its title from a French Canadian expression for menstruation (être dans ses fleurs) that Bourque recalled from her youth. She subjected images of sprouting trees to “incubation” in her own menses, darkening the image and allowing the bloody agent to encroach upon and transform the photochemical emulsion, abstracting the original rep- resentation of flowering nature through an encounter with the real substance of the human reproductive cycle.