Francine Poirier

Carole Laganière dives deeply into personal territory in this beautifully crafted exploration of absence and loss and its painful effect on daily lives. Inspired by her mother’s steadily advancing Alzheimer’s and the inevitability of her estrangement, Laganière weaves their story with the stories of others wrestling with loss: Ines, an immigrant who returns to her birth country of Croatia to find the mother who abandoned her during the war; Deni, an American author who’s finally able to search for his Quebec roots; and Nathalie, who’s desperately looking for her missing sister. Through their experiences the film ponders how absence is often the catalyst for a quest—a quest for information, understanding and often acceptance. Through its many voices, Absences speaks to us of the immense fragility and resiliency of human emotions.

A feature-length documentary portrait of Québécoise painter Johanne Corno, who has lived and worked in New York City for more than 20 years. Ignored by the art intelligentsia in Québec, she settled abroad to escape that creative constraint, and built an enviable international career. Today, she casts a lucid eye on her work and describes the resources she draws on to survive in the jungle of the contemporary art world.

A documentary about the act of filmmaking.

A blend of drama and documentary, this film follows several people caught up in the turmoil of the modern world. The drama centres on a woman who has burned out and who holds up her own despair – and her attempts to rebuild her life – as a mirror to the rest of us. With a blend of gravity and humour, Sylvie Groulx's film shows the absurdity of a society dedicated to the cult of speed at all costs.

After starting at an upmarket boarding school, a teenage girl forms close friendships with her two older roommates. However, when she discovers that her new friends are lovers she finds herself caught in a complicated situation.

Nestor, Lei, Pierrette, Mohamed, Hafida, Marius, Marc, Galina, Genady, Mike and Lala: through their presence, Le temps qu’il fait weaves a mosaic of stories in which dreams and disappointments, hopes and worries intertwine with the life that is before them. In counterpoint, there are these new landscapes of financial centers, abandoned industrial spaces and wasteland from which we hear the echo of speeches that call to take the train of the new economy. By their simple attachment to a profession which gives them a living, the men and women of the film put up resistance to these slogans. Little by little, a radical rupture is emerging between economic thought and the movement of life. A break that shapes the present time.

What place do breasts occupy in the identity of women? Intersecting several voices--adolescent girls, mothers, lesbians, dancers, bodybuilders...--this film draws a mosaic portrait of the breast, from childhood to maturity, from seduction to illness, from motherhood to surgery, from the tyranny of the image to self-acceptance. An impressionist documentary, funny and touching, against the backdrop of the beach and holidays.