Félix Dufour-Laperrière

An encounter in dark places, movements in chiaroscuro and the breath of a rising wind for the daylight to be revealed in all its amplitude.

A winter tale: the real experience of an imagined love.

Determined to stop drinking, Joseph moves into a friend's house and convinces his ex-wife Emma to join him. In the troubled times of Quebec independence referendum, this is the account of their stormy reunion.

In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false. (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle). What about the boreal forest?

A married woman has an affair. She gets pregnant by her lover and they live serenely together, although war is thundering towards their city. Despite lineups, traffic jams and shortages they manage to live a peaceful life with their little girl.

Masculine noun, shortened form of striptease. From "strip", to remove, to take away, and "tease", to entice, to tempt. And then all this in plural.

A true animated film about invented islands. About an imaginary, linguistic, political territory. About a real or dreamed country, or something in between. Archipelago is a film of drawings and speeches, that tells and dreams a place and its inhabitants, to tell and dream a little of our world and times.

Documentary essay, filmed during an Atlantic crossing aboard a cargo ship. A film about immensity and faith, about the uninterrupted movements of the waves and their power. And finally, perhaps most importantly, about the men aboard, witnesses and actors in this life between two shores, isolated in the middle of infinity. Transatlantic tells the story of the journey and daily life aboard and reveals the ship as a microcosm and a metaphor : a human island in the heart of a great elsewhere.

A short American memory, made from manipulated found footage.

M is a film of assemblage, juxtaposition and manipulation of animated structures. Small architectures appear and overlap. Brief nebulas arise, the most complex structures sometimes recalling constellations and other stellar clusters. This abstract film shows the results of a year of visual and technical researches. Hand-drawn animations were scanned, manipulated and combined. The resulting images were printed on paper and reworked, then put in relation according to their level of complexity and the movements which constitute them.

The dawn, a young woman and the end of the day in a three parts, unstable biography.

After a failed armed attack during which she abandons her companions, Hélène flees into the forest and meets Catherine, a mysterious alter ego, a carnivorous and tempting alter ego. This double will take her to a fantastic valley, where metamorphoses, poisonous powers and great upheavals will soon shake up the order of things. Hélène will have to revisit her choices and the moral, political and human dilemmas that circumscribe them.

A man has to confront the rise of the black ink.

Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.

This animated film is above all a love story told with emotion and delicacy. A man loves a woman; both of them love literature. We discover the murmur of their lives, the harmony of their feelings—and we learn how their affection for novels and poetry marks their existence beyond death. The fruitful alliance of filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s imagery and the words of Quebec poet Hélène Dorion results in a subtle, sensitive film that resonates in the viewer’s heart and mind. In its hybridization of styles and techniques, The Day Is Listening is also a most modern and daring work: its director has deftly expanded the spectrum of traditional hand-drawn animation, incorporating mosaics of real images that express a myriad of intertwining memories as well as the pulse of urban life.

« While Marilou wears out / Health exhausts / Getting laid »

« Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door » Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 1883

December 31st, at dusk. Florence, 37 weeks pregnant, is preparing for new year’s eve party. Her friends arrive, they talk loudly, they get dressed and dance together before going out. Florence finally changes her mind and decides to stay home. As she lays down, at the sound of the windy night, she thinks about the arrival of a new year, and about her new life that is about to begin.

The story of two friends on the cusp of adolescence, Rachel Samson's warm-hearted animation is an ode to those special summer days that contain major changes.