Louise Marleau

A feature-length documentary about the life and career of Italian director Luigi Cozzi and his obsession with Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Devastated but furious after his girlfriend dumps him on a metro platform, 23-year-old Cedric takes off with his unfinished novel in his bag. Fate leads him to a large, rundown house owned by Isabelle, a onetime star pianist and faded beauty. Isabelle, now a lonely 76-year-old alcoholic, passes her days at her piano and with her group of eccentric boarders. From their first meeting, Cedric knows that Isabelle is the love of his life, and Isabelle realizes he is her last chance for love. Driven by their intoxicating passion for one another, they plunge headlong into a love affair where they are pushed to the brink of hate and death, even escaping reality to keep their love alive.

In 1952, an Inuit hunter named Tivii with tuberculosis leaves his northern home and family to go recuperate at a sanatorium in Quebec City. Uprooted, far from his loved ones, unable to speak French and faced with a completely alien world, he becomes despondent. When he refuses to eat and expresses a wish to die, his nurse, Carole, comes to the realization that Tivii's illness is not the most serious threat to his well-being. She arranges to have a young orphan, Kaki, transferred to the institution. The boy is also sick, but has experience with both worlds and speaks both languages. By sharing his culture with Kaki and opening it up to others, Tivii rediscovers his pride and energy. Ultimately he also rediscovers hope through a plan to adopt Kaki, bring him home and make him part of his family

A rich American woman and her French husband start a Parisian salon.

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.

An old woman who is unaware that she is near death, falls in love with her son’s young American tutor.

Crazy Los Angeles. Work is an hour away, down a crammed six-lane freeway. It is always sunny, but the sun looks like a sickly blemish on the smog. Everyone's out to look beautiful and make money. And a kid named Rick fits right in. The Gaspé coast. Work is five minutes away on a tractor seat. When the sun shines, the ocean is set ablaze, and the scent of pine fills the crisp country air. People here just try to make ends meet, but they know how to laugh from the gut and to show each other they care. This is were Rick's father James grew up, but Rick has never been here. When Rick learns that he has inherited the ancestral farm, and that his father wants him to go to Gaspé to bury the uncle who left Rick this legacy, an extraordinary odyssey begins. Father and son start out as different from each other as Gaspé and Los Angeles, but in the process, Rick discovers manhood and James discovers fatherhood.

In this tragicomedy, Toni is the director of a staged rendition of Othello in Montreal. It is a pet project of his, financed by his loving mafia uncle. Unbeknownst to him, the audiences are also rounded up (and paid) by the same uncle. Some of them have seen every performance of this tragic play, and are understandably bored, so when the backstage romantic shenanigans of the actors result in absurd situations onstage, the audience is delighted. There are a huge number of romantic situations going on in this film at the same time. One of them involves Gaston a somewhat world-weary jazz musician, and Florence, a glamorous middle-aged woman who has been pining for him for years. Another involves to members of the musician's jazz trio. Yet another involves the play's Desdemona, Soledad, the girlfriend of the man playing Othello, who can't keep his hands off his (female) dresser.

Saturday, 12 p.m. The countdown has begun for four males on the hunt for women. Massage studio, last minute shopping, bodybuilding, our men each throw themselves ardently into the ritual of appearance. Impossible to resist the ferociously burlesque character and remarkably typical behavior of these characters. We will meet Gérard known as The Bull, Patrice known as The Lion, Jean-Jacques known as The Peacock and Serge known as The Earthworm.

Pierre is a Montreal photojournalist who returns from Nicaragua to find that his ten-year menage a trois is over. Haunted by his mid-life crisis, he becomes obsessed with trying to find out why his two lovers, Sarah and David, have left him.

After the death of her father, Anne — a brilliant but emotionally unstable painter/sculptor — returns from Switzerland to her home town in Quebec. Setting up a studio, she becomes obsessed with her work, to the extent that she grows farther and farther from her Swiss lover.

Even though the protagonist of the Canadian Femme De L'Hotel is a female filmmaker, one would think twice before suggesting that this effort by Swiss-born director Lea Pool is autobiographical. Paule Baillargeon portrays a well-known director who returns to her home town of Montreal to film a high-budget musical drama. At her hotel, Paule has a brief but unsettling encounter with a suicidal elderly woman (Louise Marleau). This element of the plot is briefly forgotten as we get to know the actors in Paule's current project. Then she meets the old lady again, and with mounting incredulity Paule discovers that the actual events in the woman's life mirror the fictional events in the director's film.

A downbeat story of life inside a women's prison. There is more crime inside than out. When the inmates see that a woman is soon to be admitted for killing a young boy, they begin to plan her murder.

A former astronaut helps a government agent and a police detective track the source of mysterious alien pod spores, filled with lethal flesh-dissolving acid, to a South American coffee plantation controlled by alien pod clones.

Set in a small rural town in the Quebec Laurentians, Michelle lives in an isolated house with her mentally-challenged brother Guy and her 13 year old daughter Manon. Together the three of them survive by running a small firewood business and performing other odd jobs. Michelle is frustrated with living in poverty and being the center of several people who demand her affection; her brother is like a second child who lives in his own world, his romantic obsession with their wealthy client Madame Viau-Vachon being an exercise in futility. Maurice, the local police chief, is her lover and Gaetan, a mechanic and family friend, would like to be. Most demanding of all is her daughter, who has an unhealthy emotional dependence on her. Precocious and uninterested in school, Manon is jealous of her Mother's suitors and angry at being left home to do chores and care for Guy. When an event occurs that threatens the emotional dynamic between Manon and her mother...

A woman's marriage is in crisis as a result of her difficult and complex relationship with her mother.

Andras Vayda grows up in a turbulent, war-torn Hungary, where he procures local girls for the occupying G.I.'s during World War II. Disappointed by girls of his age, he meets Maya, a married women in her thirties, who tutors him in the lessons of love and romance. Maya is only the first of many mature women that Andras will meet through his teenage and young adult life.

When his friend suddenly commits suicide, reporter Paul senses something strange about it. When he starts investigating, a series of sinister events leads him to a deadly Satanic cult.

A priest and nun, haunted by physical longings, leave their respective callings. Even after their desires are fulfilled they experience crisis of faith.

An engineer from Paris flies to Montreal, partly on business, partly in search of parents displaced by World War II, and partly because of the prevailing restlessness of the age.

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.

A film in four episodes presenting teenage girls chosen as representative of their country and our time, in Italy, France, Japan and Canada. In spite of the stylistic peculiarities of the filmmakers, we find in each of them the same desire not to affirm anything, not to judge, but to quite simply show.