Available on
Visit to a Foreign Country
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.
Claude Jutra
Michel Brault
Also Directed by Claude Jutra
A writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Québec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnières: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor. Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love.
Set in cold rural Quebec at Christmas time, we follow the coming of age of a young boy and the life of his family which owns the town's general store and undertaking business. Mon Oncle Antoine is Director Claude Jutra's masterpiece: A poignant, starkly honest, but humane film, shot through with authenticity from beginning to end. Realized with an unflagging artistic vision, Mon Oncle Antoine poetically portrays a young boy's coming of age, vividly capturing the Quebec mining town in which he lives.
Ian Tracey plays 11-year-old Peter, who is plagued by demons and sent to an institution for setting fires. Peter escapes and hops a freight train headed into northern B.C. He is befriended by a native shaman or "dreamspeaker" (George Clutesi). The shaman makes some strides but is unable to get to the root of Peter's problems. Peter is captured by the police and taken back to the institution where he slides down even further.
This feature documentary about education explores the mid-century state of learning in the classrooms of North America. New approaches to learning and the emerging technologies that facilitate them are explored, including the new roles of the computer, tape recorder and television. Directed by Quebec cinema giant Claude Jutra (Mon Oncle Antoine), the film was produced with the collaboration of researchers studying all forms of education, from infancy to adulthood.
An experimental movie based on a poem of the French writer and director Jean Cocteau about a servant who fantasises about killing the lady of the house.
A student with a crush on his teacher becomes even more frustrated when his widowed father begins going out with the woman.
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.
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.
Poetry and cinema merge as 11 filmmakers bring to life 21 poems by Quebecois poets.