Gilles Groulx

The Snowshoers

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.

Washed Hands

An efficiency expert is called in to downsize a trucking company and the employees fight to establish a union to save their jobs.

Québec...?

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.

Between You and You All

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

Les héritiers

Gilles Groulx's first film shot in 1955 with a camera borrowed from his brother and edited during his spare time when he worked as an editor at the Radio-Canada news service a few years before he joined the NFB. Silent film, presented as its author left it, where the soil and the dialectic of Groulx's work are already there: documentary realism, the social space to be explored, daily life, the relationship between individual and society, social disparities, the consumer society, seduction and happiness.

Where Are You?

An experimental drama following three main characters who embody different attitudes about consumerism. A window onto Quebec in the late 1960s, this protest film explores these characters' daily lives, their trials and aspirations. Regarded as an innovative and militant work, buoyed by hard-hitting film language that includes subtitles and intertitles, quotations, offscreen voices and songs and references to advertising.

24 Hours or More

This feature film made during an exceptionally feverish period of popular revolt that saw the coming together of Quebec’s 3 main unions (CSN, FTQ, CEQ) is a cinematic tract by socially engaged filmmaker Gilles Groulx. Propped against the backdrop of the 1970 October Crisis, the film is a frontal assault denouncing a “consumer society” viewed as the ultimate embodiment of evil.

Il était une guerre

We witness the race for marriage of thousands of young people, wanting at all costs to escape conscription, then we are transported to the war factories and we thus witness the difficulties of work in this place. Then it's the Italian campaign in 1943 and, finally, the return to Quebec where readjustment to civilian life proves more difficult than it seems. These events are experienced and told by the voice of a young man.

The Cat in the Bag

A young journalist is unhappy with society and contemplates what he can do about it. Symbolizes the political coming of age of the people of Québec.

Santa Gertrudis, la première question sur le bonheur

Place de l'équation

Seeing Miami...

A cinematic allegory of the modern U.S. at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gilles Groulx’s masterfully poetic montage essay evokes Quebecers’ simultaneous aversion and attraction to the El Dorado that is Florida—both a giant nursing home and an ideal of progress, American style.

France on a Pebble

The 4,000 inhabitants of the archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon describe it as a caillou—a tiny rock on which they live, lost in the shadow of Newfoundland. There is something mysterious and inexplicable about this extension of faraway France. In broad strokes, the film paints a picture of this insular population, revealing their history, daily lives and singular character.

Une semaine dans la vie de camarades

A road movie whose journey intersects with and extends the events of the International Counter-Culture Meeting that took place in 1975 in Montreal. This meeting, at the heart of the film, features several important figures of the counterculture in Quebec. Throughout the film, these individuals, often through their creative endeavors, question the evolution of their society and counterculture itself.

Alone or with Others

At the end of the year 1961, three young students, Denys Arcand, Denis Héroux and Stéphane Venne, decide to direct a feature-length film centered on the perks of student life. The film mixes fiction and reality in the style of cinéma vérité. "Alone or with others" is often considered the first indepent film of Québec.

Jusqu'au cou

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

Golden Gloves

A classic NFB documentary about the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, the Canadian amateur's hope for success in the boxing world. This Gilles Groulx film shows three Montreal boxers in training. In behind-the-scenes interviews they talk about their ambitions and what prompted them to take up the sport. - NFB

Au pays de Zom

A film-opera divided into nine segments, Au pays de Zom tells a day in the life of Mister Zom, a capitalist infatuated with his own person, whose conformism is only matched by his artistic velleity. A thematic sequel to his movie filmed with Mexican peasants, here Groulx asks, by making a business man sing, a second question on happiness: this time about the ones for whom happiness is linked with the possession of overabundance. He delivers, by developing the theatrical dimension with great emphasis, a social pamphlet with a strong satirical charge that he himself qualified as a "neo-surrealist fantasy".