François Girard

Movies

Surviving Progress
Associate Producer
Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.
Pauline et François
Production Design
Pauline, 28, hopes that by moving to the countryside she will be able to come to terms with the recent death of her husband. Here, she meets François, an introverted man of about her age whose emotional wounds run much deeper than her own. Forever scarred by a childhood tragedy, François lives a prisoner-like existence, guarded night and day by his authoritarian father and intrusive sister. Pauline and François discover a common bond in the fact that they both desperately want to start a new life, but lack the confidence to do so. At first, they find it hard to communicate with one another. But, gradually, they find the words to express their feelings and begin to realise that each has the power to set the other free...
Cold Showers
Set Decoration
Mickael's family is struggling (they don't have enough money to pay for hot water) however his life is full with Judo and his girlfriend Venessa. Then Mickael makes a decision to open up his relationship to include Clement his rich-kid Judo partner, starting a chain of events.
Cold Showers
Production Design
Mickael's family is struggling (they don't have enough money to pay for hot water) however his life is full with Judo and his girlfriend Venessa. Then Mickael makes a decision to open up his relationship to include Clement his rich-kid Judo partner, starting a chain of events.
Adieu
Production Design
Under threat in Algeria, Ismahel emigrates to France where he wants to live and work, with the hope that the people he's fleeing from will forget him the time he is away. In the letters that he writes to the daughter that he left behind in his homeland, he tells his own story in the guise of the biblical tale of Jonas and the Whale. Somewhere in France, an elderly farmer has just lost his young son. His three other children help him as much as they can to get through the trial of the funeral, but the ceremony is halted when the old man falls ill. The two stories unfold parallel to each other and are alternated.