Michel Brault

A woman agrees to a marriage of convenience with a refugee.

Open details →

Open details →

27 shorts films about francophone traditional music in America.

Open details →

A fact-based account of ordinary citizens who found themselves arrested and imprisoned without charge for weeks during the October Crisis in 1970 Quebec.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Set in New Brunswick, "Éloge du chiac" takes the form of an open discussion between a young French-language teacher and her students in Moncton. Through their exchanges, Michel Brault examines the challenges of preserving French in a bilingual region where English predominates, and explores the contested status of Chiac, a local French dialect shaped by centuries of linguistic contact.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

From the lower St. Lawrence, a picture of whale hunting that looks more like a round-up, with a corral, whale-boys and all. In 1534, when he stopped at the island he named l'Île-aux-Coudres, Jacques Cartier saw how the Indians captured the little white beluga whales by setting a fence of saplings into off-shore mud. In the film, the islanders show that the old method still works, thanks to the trusting 'sea-pigs,' the same old tide, and a little magic.

Open details →

A young singer-songwriter abandons his life in his hometown and moves to the city to make it big. He achieves fame, but it comes at a price.

Open details →

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. One of four film sketches on the problems of adolescents facing the adult world in the 1960s included in the anthology film That Tender Age (La fleur de l'âge, ou Les adolescentes). The three other sketches were directed by Jean Rouch, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Gian Vittorio Baldi.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

A 16 year old girl recalls the last moments of her summer vacation, spent with friends in the Laurentians north of Montreal. She reminisces about their talks on life, death, love, and God. Shot in direct cinema style, working from a script that left room for the teenagers to improvise and express their own thoughts, the film sought to capture the immediacy of the youths presence their bodies, their language, their environment.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

A compilation of seven shorts made for the National Film Board of Canada. Features the NFBC shorts, "Nahanni," "Le Merle," "A Chairy Tale," "The Cars in Your Life," "Corral," "Wrestling," and "Neighbors."

Open details →

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.

Open details →

This film looks at the world of children with hearing loss and the importance of early diagnosis. With its straightforward, rigorous cinematic style and intimate approach to the subject, the film focuses on the human rather than the technical side of the problem of hearing impairment.

Open details →

A candid-camera view of professional wrestling as seen in the Montréal Forum, where some of the biggest bouts are staged, and in back-street wrestling parlours where the warriors practice their art.

Open details →

This short documentary records the celebration and ritual surrounding a snowshoe competition in Sherbrooke in the late 1950s. The film marked the beginning of a new approach to reality in documentary and prefigures the trademark style of the NFB's newly formed French Unit. Today, "Les raquetteurs" is considered a precursor to the birth of direct cinema.

Open details →

An experimental short film shot in slow motion and set to Ottokar Nováček's violin composition Perpetuum mobile, the film depicts a love triangle between two men and a woman.

Open details →

An anthology of sequences from the best films that the National Film Board of Canada produced since its beginnings. Divided by themes and presented by a trio of actors-signers (including Carle's wife Chloé Sainte-Marie) who sings the same song in between the movie excerpts. This movie celebrated the anniversary of the National Film Board in 1985.

Open details →

This short documentary film is a fascinating portrait of urban and rural Quebec in the late 1960s, as the province entered modernity. The collective work produced for the Quebec Ministry of Industry and Commerce calls on several major Quebec figures.

Open details →

A psychiatrist is sent to evaluate if a convicted multiple murderer who's awaiting execution on Death Row for eighth year now and whose behavior during that time got more and more erratic is still mentally fit to be executed.

Open details →

While visiting their grandparents in the Québec countryside, two children enter a fantasy kingdom and are confronted by evil forces.

Open details →

An unconventional undercover Chicago cop and his partner are recruited to commit the murder of a New Orleans criminal kingpin.

Open details →

A regular night of poker among four friends turns into a night full of conflict, recriminations and self-reflection.

Open details →

Virginia Tregan returns to her home in the U.S. Deep South from a sojourn in Paris only to discover that her family plantation and its holdings have been lost. She determines to recoup her family's fortune.

Open details →

A group of friends reunite after thirty years of separation.

Open details →

Celebrated heart surgeon Thomas Vrain supports the research of an offbeat scientist who has invented an artificial heart. Against the advice of the Ethics Committee, Dr. Vrain decides to perform the first artificial heart transplant.

Open details →

A woman is overwhelmed with having to deal with her emotionally unstable daughter, mentally-challenged brother and two suitors while simultaneously trying to run her small firewood business.

Open details →

Five men work together in a communal effort to build a skiff on Ile-aux-Coudres, an island in the St. Lawrence River. It is built in a traditional fashion, all the more remarkable because no blueprint is used. The film does not merely record a building tradition, it reveals the character of the craftsmen, who are influenced by a pre-industrial way of life underscored by spontaneity and wit.

Open details →

A director and an editor, both women, cannot work on a movie presenting the rape of a nurse without reacting on the scenes they're working on, the situation of womanhood in general, and the way the 'Justice' handle those cases of rape.

Open details →

Working as a pharmacy clerk while dreaming of escape through dance, Normande St-Onge supports a household of dependent and unstable relatives. As her efforts to protect and hold together her improvised family intensify, the pressures of exploitation, eviction, and emotional isolation push her toward psychological collapse. Directed by Gilles Carle, the film blurs the boundary between fantasy and breakdown.

Open details →

Hélène is a woman who already has, in her view, quite enough children. For some time she has secretly been taking birth control pills, but now she is too old to use them safely. When her husband Gabriel discovers the pills, he is distressed, since he wants a large family. The two of them discuss their differing attitudes and desires but come to no resolution.

Open details →

A young woman arrives to Montreal to find love. A fortune teller tells her that a wealthy man meant for her is right around the corner so she goes looking even among her odd rag tag group roommates.

Open details →

A fact-based account of ordinary citizens who found themselves arrested and imprisoned without charge for weeks during the October Crisis in 1970 Quebec.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

An incident from the early days of Québec's quiet revolution, tailor-made for the cartoonist. It is the story of a Montréal commuter train, a unilingual ticket collector and a bilingual passenger. The passenger appears on screen himself to describe his bid to have tickets requested in French as well as in English. What ensued, and how even the railway president became involved, is illustrated with wit and humor.

Open details →

A young boy learns the rituals of what his father and his friends perceive as manhood on a weekend hunting trip.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Structured as a cinematic essay, "Un pays sans bon sens!" explores the emotional and political foundations of belonging to a nation. Moving between Quebec, France, and Western Canada, Pierre Perrault interrogates questions of cultural maturity, autonomy, and territory at a moment when French Canadians were reexamining their collective identity.

Open details →

Short film about the underground part, both geographical and social, of the city of Montreal, through the obsession of a business magnate for a young woman.

Open details →

A chronicle of the lives of a couple and the gradual dissolution of their relationship.

Open details →

Set in New Brunswick, "Éloge du chiac" takes the form of an open discussion between a young French-language teacher and her students in Moncton. Through their exchanges, Michel Brault examines the challenges of preserving French in a bilingual region where English predominates, and explores the contested status of Chiac, a local French dialect shaped by centuries of linguistic contact.

Open details →

Open details →

Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.

Open details →

A doctor living in a small mining town discovers that his dissatisfied young wife is having an affair with a truck driver.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

From the lower St. Lawrence, a picture of whale hunting that looks more like a round-up, with a corral, whale-boys and all. In 1534, when he stopped at the island he named l'Île-aux-Coudres, Jacques Cartier saw how the Indians captured the little white beluga whales by setting a fence of saplings into off-shore mud. In the film, the islanders show that the old method still works, thanks to the trusting 'sea-pigs,' the same old tide, and a little magic.

Open details →

A young singer-songwriter abandons his life in his hometown and moves to the city to make it big. He achieves fame, but it comes at a price.

Open details →

Dedicated “to all victims of intolerance,” "The Devil’s Toy" is a faux–public service documentary that chronicles the early days of skateboarding in Montreal. Framed as mock anti-skateboarding propaganda, Claude Jutra contrasts official hostility with the exhilaration and freedom experienced by youths racing downhill through city streets, shortly before the activity was banned.

Open details →

Today it is the city of Montreal, but 3 centuries ago the tiny band of missionary founders called it Ville-Marie, the holy city of Mary. This film goes back to its beginning and those who felt called to plant an oasis of Christianity in the North American wilderness. In an imaginative, at times almost surrealistic, way the film recalls the highborn company from France, and shows what survives of Ville-Marie in the Montreal of today.

Open details →

The story of a young university student who deals with love in the midst of the Quebec separatist movement in the 1960s.

Open details →