A Cry for Happiness
Poetry and cinema merge as 11 filmmakers bring to life 21 poems by Quebecois poets.
Denis Villeneuve
Michel Brault
Paule Baillargeon
Kim Nguyen
Marie-Julie Dallaire
André Forcier
Marcel Simard
Manon Barbeau
Philippe Baylaucq
Chloé Leriche
Genevieve Allard
Also Directed by Denis Villeneuve
A politician has just a couple of minutes to convince people to vote for him, and tries to seduce his audience with promises he thinks they want to hear.
An experimental short about the relationship between music and color.
When Keller Dover's daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police pursue multiple leads and the pressure mounts. But just how far will this desperate father go to protect his family?
During an opulent and luxurious banquet, complete with hordes of servers and valets, eleven pampered guests participate in what appears to be a ritualistic gastronomic carnage. In this absurd and grotesque universe, an unexpected sequence of events destabilizes the endless symphony of abundance.
Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet's exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence-a commodity capable of unlocking humanity's greatest potential-only those who can conquer their fear will survive.
adaptation of (Cleopatra: A Life) by Stacy Schiff
A mother's last wishes send twins Jeanne and Simon on a journey to Middle East in search of their tangled roots. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's acclaimed play, Incendies tells the powerful and moving tale of two young adults' voyage to the core of deep-rooted hatred, never-ending wars and enduring love.
After escaping unscathed from a car accident, photo model Simone decides that having a baby is the only way to give her vacant life some meaning. She asks her best friend Philippe to get her pregnant, and he reluctantly agrees, on the condition that they conceive somewhere in a desert, so they leave Montréal on a 24-hour round-trip to Salt Lake City to find a suitable spot.
Cleopatra as a firm ruler and military tactician who embarked on a ruthless rise to power.
An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico.
Also Directed by Michel Brault
A fact-based account of ordinary citizens who found themselves arrested and imprisoned without charge for weeks during the October Crisis in 1970 Quebec.
In the film, produced for the series "Young Scientists", for the CBC, a group of young people on vacation share the discovery of the application of the lever in some applications of everyday life.
Morbihan is one of the poorest regions in Brittany. Joseph, a 33-year-old farmer, can no longer live off the land. He is hired at the fancy new plant that has just opened where he enters a world of rote work. Fortunately he can go home to his farm every evening, far from the large urban centers where workers must usually live.
Six stories about Montreal. 1: A young housewife from Toronto samples the nightlife using basic French. 2: The tale of a painting of Montreal's first mayor, Jacques Viger. 3: During a hockey game, Madeleine tries to tell Roger she wants a divorce after forty years of marriage. 4: A visitor to a conference on pictographs arrives at the airport, where the female customs officer steals a momento from each person. 5: As she is being driven to the hospital in an ambulance after an auto accident, Sarah recalls her life. 6: At a diplomatic reception, an older woman reminisces about her grand love in Montreal.
Two teenage girls go to winter carnival in Quebec City for the first time. Their ambiguous, tentative relation with a young boy brings both of them the sweet intensity and disillusionment of first love.
They come in high-powered convertibles, with cameras and curiosity, to look at French Canada and French-Canadians. Their usual objective is Québec City, where they can soak up a bit of French culture without a trip to France. With an eye for humour, VISIT TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY shows the people of Québec taking a look at American tourists who have come to Québec to take a look at them.
At the instigation of the filmmakers, the young men of the Ile-aux-Coudres in the middle of the St-Lawrence River try as a memorial to their ancestors to revive the fishing of the belugas interrupted in 1924.
In the late 1960s, with the triumph of bilingualism and biculturalism, New Brunswick's Université de Moncton became the setting for the awakening of Acadian nationalism after centuries of defeatism and resignation. Although 40% of the province's population spoke French, they had been unable to make their voices heard. The movement started with students-sit-ins, demonstrations against Parliament, run-ins with the police - and soon spread to a majority of Acadians. The film captures the behind-the-scenes action and the students' determination to bring about change. An invaluable document of the rebirth of a people.
Taking the form of a conversation between a young teacher at a French school in Moncton and her students, the film shows how hard it is for francophones to preserve their language in a society where English is everywhere and has been for centuries.
Also Directed by Paule Baillargeon
Trente tableaux is a 2011 autobiographical feature documentary by Quebec film director Paule Baillargeon, made during her two-year film residency with the National Film Board of Canada. It is an anthology film composed of 30 short portraits—or tableau vivant—of her 66 years of life to date, reflecting her experiences as a woman in Quebec's changing society.
A woman deals with her mother, an arts professor, plunging into chaos due to Alzheimer's.
A 12-year-old girl faces a father she hardly remembers after his sex change.
On a wedding day, women are confined to the kitchen to prepare the meal while the men wait to be served. While men talk politics and sports, women talk about their condition. A teenager observes the gap between the sexes. Co-directed by two actresses, Paule Baillargeon and Frederique Collin, The Red Kitchen is the birth of the Quebec women's cinema. The birth of the film was difficult, and funding has been largely achieved through donations from friends and a benefit concert. This war of the sexes takes place in a demanding formal research, based on the improvisation of the actors, whose preparation took place over long sessions in the workshop. The end result mixes black humour, horror and a very expressive fantasy that gave rise to heated debates.
A revealing look at the great Quebecois director who gave us such classic films as Mon Oncle Antoine, A toute prendre and Kamouraska: Power of Passion. Amidst the rise of French-Canadian identity and the political struggles of the '60s, Jutra was at the forefront of a group of artists dedicated to social change and attacking taboo.
Also Directed by Kim Nguyen
An exploration of our sense of smell and how it impacts our lives.
Two social outcasts in 19th century Eastern Europe, Alexandre and Ulysse, become friends and settle down to live alone on the edge of a marsh that is reputedly haunted by demons, monsters and goblins. These two men have been outcasts all their lives. Alexandre was raised in a nomad family that traveled from town to town, being rejected by the people of his homeland. Due to his physical abnormalities, Ulysse has always been pushed aside ever since his childhood. When a strange murder is committed in a nearby village, the peasants turn their suspicions on Alexandre and Ulysse, because they are different. In the eyes of the villagers, they are demons that must be hunted, burned and killed.
Somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Komona a 14-year-old girl tells her unborn child growing inside her the story of her life since she has been at war. Everything started when she was abducted by the rebel army at the age of 12.
Chaos ensues after global warming transforms a working-class Montreal neighborhood into a world Mecca for truffles.
Set in a small town near the North Pole where roads lead to nowhere, the story follows Roman and Lucy, two burning souls who come together to make a leap for life and inner peace.
The story of an unlikely encounter between Gordon, a hexapod operator, and Ayusha, a young woman from the Middle East. Gordon, guardian of a pipeline in this desert region, becomes fascinated by Ayusha, while piloting his robotic spider from the other side of the world, in America. Ayusha is promised to an older man she doesn't love. Despite the distance, their mutual fear and their imperfect interaction, he will do everything in his power to help her escape her fate.
A '90s-set single-camera comedy about a hip-hop-loving Asian kid growing up in suburban Orlando, being raised by an immigrant father obsessed with all things American and an immigrant mother often bewildered by white culture.
A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.
A doctor broken by 8 years of war in North Africa tries to come back home. On his way, he is faced with a bigger challenge: save a city from the plague... and from madness. (IMDB)
This tribute to Denis Marleau takes a simple and forthright approach to one of the major themes of his work: the relationship between material reality and consciousness, or more specifically, Freud’s concept of the Uncanny, which often emerges when dissonance between material reality and consciousness rises to the surface. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in co-operation with the National Arts Centre and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation on the occasion of the 2012 Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards.
Also Directed by Marie-Julie Dallaire
Big Giant Wave is an ode to music, the invisible abstract and fleeting sequence of sounds that creates in the brain the same reaction as chocolate, sex, or drugs.
Through an immigrant cab driver, our world collides with a nervous filmmaker, a lawyer whose new breasts her ex-boyfriend wants to see, a mystery man, a gay man who might or might not have AIDS, and a birthday girl who got stood up. It is a mixture of laughter and sadness, all floating on a sea of philosophy.
Also Directed by André Forcier
A woman seeks revenge over false accusations of murder.
In a style evocative of Fellini at his most surreal, this bizarre French Canadian fantasy follows the romance between a young filmmaker and a bearded lady from a local circus during the 1960s. The story begins in a contemporary theater where a projectionist describes, to movie director Rex Prince, the ghostly spirit that seems to be haunting his film. The story then races backward to the 1960s when a half-mad, idealistic Rex was busily making his first film, a Marxist tract depicting poverty in Montreal. Edouard Dore, a well-connected editor works with him and it is he who takes Rex to a carnival late one night to meet the performers in a freakshow. The first person Rex meets is Le Grand Zenon, a hulking one-eyed fellow with the amazing ability to use his eye to project movie images on a screen with neither a projector nor film.
Tragicomic portrait of a bar's owners and patrons in a poor Montreal neighbourhood.
Manon, is obsessed with famous writer Chester Celine, who hails from Wyoming. Manon learns Chester is coming to town and becomes a slinky, svelte temptress
Toronto International Film Festival 2004
Brother Marie-Victorin, founder of Montreal’s Botanical Garden, is bored with heaven and decides to return earth to help former agronomist turned beekeeper Albert save Quebec’s flora from a multinational that is poisoning the Earth with chemicals.
A seemingly idle guy and an unprincipled girl to whom everything seems to come easily will see their lives sealed in a brutal way.
A friendship between a good man with bowling as his only passion and a queer albino.
A working-class family fights a greedy developer for control of their neighborhood.
Also Directed by Marcel Simard
Also Directed by Manon Barbeau
"Springtime means being outside. It means being able to play hopscotch, and sing songs, and play with bolo-bats. Comptines is about little girls celebrating spring in Montréal. They play in alley-ways, in doorways, in parks and on the street. They sing songs that were sung by their parents, and maybe their grandparents. Gibberish rhymes, counting songs, and old folksongs ring out in children's voices. Without commentary, this short sketch travels the by-ways of Montréal where little girls play. Comptines is a French word for children's song games." -- National Film Board of Canada
Also Directed by Philippe Baylaucq
Dancer in three dimensions and glowing from the inside.
Also Directed by Chloé Leriche
Menacing smoke rises over the forests of Manawan. Shawnouk has lost touch with the traditions of the Atikamekw people, and he struggles with daily life on the reservation. His mother's boyfriend is a policeman, and though he means well, Shawnouk won't accept him as part of the family. There's so much missing in his life. One night, Shawnouk gets involved in a break-in. When the home-owner turns up, Shawnouk pushes himself between the man and the gun. In the end, he is the one with blood on his hands. He goes into hiding in the vast forests of Québec. In the search for his roots, he faces regret, pain and anger. Fire and smoke, the ancient trees, and the music of his ancestors help Shawnouk to face his biggest challenge: the confrontation with himself.