
Directing
Gilles Carle, OC GOQ (July 31, 1928 – November 28, 2009) was a French Canadian director, screenwriter and painter. Gilles Carle, who was a key figure in the development of a commercial Quebec cinema, worked as a graphic artist and writer before he joined the National Film Board of Canada in 1960. His innovative debut feature, La Vie heureuse de Léopold Z., tracked the adventures of a snowplough operator during a madcap Christmas Eve. But after the NFB rejected several of his projects, he began working independently. In 1971 Carle joined forces with Pierre Lamy to form Les Productions Carle-Lamy, which produced Claude Jutra’s epic Kamouraska, Denys Arcand’s early features and all his early films. The quirkily paced, proto-feminist La Vraie Nature de Bernadette – widely regarded as his best film – and Le Mort d’un bûcheron eventually led to the more mainstream but graceful Les Plouffe and the epic love story Maria Chapdelaine, both classics of Quebec cinema. In 1972 Carle won the Canadian Film Award for best Director for his The True Nature of Bernadette. In 1990, he was awarded the Government of Quebec's Prix Albert-Tessier. In 1997, Carle received a Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Canada's highest honour in the performing arts. In 1998, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2007, he was made a Grand Officer of the Ordre National du Quebec. Description above from the Wikipedia article Gilles Carle, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.


Gilles Carle, the prolific director of such movies as La vraie nature de Bernadette and Maria Chapdelaine, has been struggling against Parkinsons disease with dignity for about fifteen years. Based on Carles last script completed in 2000, entitled 'Mona MC Gill et son vieux père malade', Charles Binamés documentary, which took slightly over two years to film, gives us a friendly, penetrating look of a brave, lucid creator confronted with suffering and the perspective of death. Although the subject is grave, we see a stong will to live and to create. A movie shrouded in all the light and love of Chloé Ste-Marie, the famous directors companion of 25 years.

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.

The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.

When a sexually promiscuous young woman finds herself pregnant and unmarried her three brothers vow to find the man responsible and punish him for what they consider the rape of their sister.

Two incredibly primitive backwoods types have just been released from prison for kidnapping the local police chief's daughter but still have a hankering for a woman. When they return to their campsite, they discover a woodland nymph whom they both bed and who drives them wild. Jealousy arises.

Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.

Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.

Unable to keep her social commentary to herself and concentrate solely on her show dancing, the girl in this film is shot to death in the Quebec woods by people who don't want propagandizing about Chile to be openly voiced. She is discovered by a mysterious stranger, who heals her wounds and reanimates her by blowing on them. After he takes her back to his cabin, they fall in love.

This meditative French-Canadian film tells the story of a young woman's search for the father she has never known. Marie Chapdelaine (Carole Laure) grew up in a remote area of Quebec without ever knowing her father, a lumberjack. She moves to Montreal, settles in there with a job as a topless dancer and begins her search for him. Eventually, with the help of his former mistress, they find the lumber camp he was working in, only to discover that he was killed in a labor dispute.

This meditative French-Canadian film tells the story of a young woman's search for the father she has never known. Marie Chapdelaine (Carole Laure) grew up in a remote area of Quebec without ever knowing her father, a lumberjack. She moves to Montreal, settles in there with a job as a topless dancer and begins her search for him. Eventually, with the help of his former mistress, they find the lumber camp he was working in, only to discover that he was killed in a labor dispute.

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.

In this French–Canadian oddity of music and drama, an actress in a traveling musical revue is involved with the show's director until she meets and falls for an aging ecological activist. He too is drawn to her, and together they try to stop a factory from being built over an old-growth forest.


