Rita Lafontaine

Four Anglo-Canadians and a New Yorker find themselves in a two-week long total French immersion program in the fictional, remote town of St-Isidore-du-Coeur-de-Jésus, tucked away somewhere in Northern Quebec. The place is perfect for total immersion since, according to the most recent census, 99% of the population is comprised of pure laine Quebeckers for the most part unilingual French, fervently nationalist, and all, save one person, named Tremblay.

Noémie, sept ans bientôt huit, passe beaucoup de temps avec sa voisine, Madame Lumbago, puisque ses parents sont très occupés à cause de leur travail. Monsieur Émile, le défunt mari de Madame Lumbago, lui avait un jour parlé d'un trésor caché dans son appartement, et depuis, la petite fille épluche chaque racoin pour résoudre ce fameux mystère. Se trouvant face à l'éventualité d'un échec, la petite Noémie, persévérante et téméraire, décide de dessiner un plan du logement de sa gardienne et demande l'aide de son ami Francis pour l'aider à fouiller toutes les pièces et percer le secret.

A much-needed boost, in the form of a new factory, is promised to the residents of the tiny fishing village St. Marie-La-Mauderne, provided they can lure a doctor to take up full-time residency on the island. Inspired, the villagers devise a scheme to make Dr. Christopher Lewis a local.

Louise is living in Montreal, unemployed. Her sister Paulette often gives her a hard time. She only gets to see her poetry-quoting married boyfriend Julien once a week. She hangs out a lot at the dance studio in her building... Louise decides to offer an hour of her time to strangers on the street. "An hour of myself", to do whatever they want to do. But one hour precisely, that's it. This leads to many different situations, some funny, some sexy, some sad. Louise talks to someone who later turns out to have been an undercover reporter. The reporter anticipates a bad end for Louise...

Marie, incapable of choosing between three marriage proposals, decides to give up. Circumstances mean that the three men meet. Far from being hostile, Stéphane, Fabrice and Paul console each other....

Catherine, a concert pianist, is surprised one night by the arrival of her best friend from childhood, Marie-Alexandrine (Max), whom she hasn't seen for 25 years. Catherine and Max were Québec's most promising young pianists in the mid-1960's when the adventurous Max gets pregnant. She wants to keep the child, but her mother forces her to give him up for adoption; afterwards, Max leaves Québec and music. Now, years later, she returns, obsessed with finding her son. She locates the adoption records, and social services contacts her son to ask if he wants to see her. He refuses, but she keeps trying. Is a relationship with him possible? And what about her musical talent?

Pierre is in love with two women and has a stable relationship with both of them. His wife, all by herself, makes him feel whole. However, he has the identical feeling with his librarian mistress and cannot understand why this arrangement shouldn't be satisfactory for everyone concerned.

A quiet painter, separated from his wife for a year, receives a suitcase in the mail from his mother, whom he hasn't seen since infancy. He believes she abandoned him to his wealthy, paternal grandparents. The suitcase contains mementos and a diary, a long letter to him, written over the years, with details of her youth, her first job as a pianist at a cinema, the coming of talkies, her marriage, and how he came to live with his grandparents. As he reads through the materials and her story comes to life, his son Antoine, who's about 10 or 12, tries to break through his father's silence and sorrow by taking matters into his own hands.

Florent Boissonneault and his young wife Elise always had one dream: own a restaurant. When they meet a strange old man, Egon Ratablavasky, their dream become reality, but only to quick turn into a nightmare when they sadly discover they had been tricked by him, and lost everything. But their dream is not dead, and a strong desire of avenging soon bring them back in business, with the help of an homeless kid, a french cook and a friendly journalist. But the old man still had trick on for them his bag...

In Quebec 40s, orphans or abandoned children are placed in a gigantic psychiatric hospital where children were locked. Were they sick? No, they simply had no family. To escape this oppressive universe, they created a parallel world: the institution's basement where, in a maze of tunnels, they founded an independent company, with its rituals, spells. A young girl, Agnes, reigns over this underground world that adults seem to tolerate.

Les Grands Enfants does not tell a story in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers an honest image of people's dreams of change : people often unemployed, dissatisfied in some way with their work, or caught up in complicated social relationships. The film is set in Montreal.

A young police officer goes through Abitibi to take a train with a young convict who escaped from her orphanage.

30-year-old Quebec City native Gisèle lives a quiet life as a secretary without happiness with her parents and siblings. One day, tired of being teased by her office mates, she decides to consult a marriage agency to find her soul mate.

In 1940, two sisters work in an ammunition factory, but dream of marriage.

A television host tries to react to the process of alienation that the public is subjected to from variety shows.

A married man and his family take in his brother, who is coming out from a religious order. They decide to realise the old family dream, migrate to Florida. But it won't be as easy as they think.

Although he is something of a layabout, and is still living with his mother, her death comes as something of a shock to Louis Pelletier (Gilbert Sicotte). Still, he has hopes of some sort of legacy and believes that his relatives will help him find a job. All his hopes are dashed when, before the funeral, his three aunts come to Quebec City to settle their sister's estate. As grasping and efficient a crew as ever strode a parlor, by the time they leave, the estate has been cleaned to the bones, as if by vultures.

Seasoned drug smuggler and thief François “Chico” Tremblay is tired of his modest lifestyle. Given the opportunity to earn $50,000 killing a prominent New York City gangster, he leaps at the opportunity, ignoring the warnings of Montreal’s leading mob boss, who has forbidden local criminals from taking the assignment. Upon his return, Chico discovers he is being pursued from all sides, prompting an unlikely response: he calls a local talk radio show and starts revealing the mafia’s most carefully guarded secrets. As his revelations get more shocking, so do the tactics of his adversaries, culminating in a devastating gut punch of a finale.

Two women and a transvestite gay man cross paths in this French Canadian drama. The transvestite is preparing for a drag-queen beauty pageant, and has decided to present himself as Cleopatra. Of the two women, one was just fired from her waitressing job and seeks to go back to work at the nightclub where the beauty pageant is to be held. The other woman's mother has just won one million food stamps.

A down-and-out man who got separated, gets his second chance in a boarding house, thanks to a friend who is a con man, and falls in love with a roommate. However, when he gets a job, his ego gets over and might lose everything he got.

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.

Fictional character played by 24 different actresses, Françoise Durocher is altogether small time waitress, hostess and barmaid. Together, according to the author, they represent the archetypical Québec waitress that everyday waits on us with a smile, despite whatever problems she faces in her personal life. First cinematographic experience of the Brassard-Tremblay tandem, this film full of ironic joy details all the nuances of the waitress living conditions.