Gilles Carle

This short, silent film captures a Sunday afternoon at a community skating rink. Iconic Quebec director Gilles Carle has the camera follow toddlers learning to skate, young girls flashing their skates and boys decked out in the colours of their favourite hockey teams. A picture perfect moment on a bright winter's day.

This short documentary shows Canada's top swimmers in training for the 1964 Olympic Games. Under the critical eye of coach Ed Healy, they practice long hours in the gym and in the pool to build strength and stamina.

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.

Deliberately Felliniesque, this surreal and uneven Canadian satire from iconoclastic French Canadian director Gilles Carle offers an episodic look into an anarchistic, metaphorical world filled with a bizarre assortment of weirdos, wackos and misanthropes. The story roughly centers on the adventures of Yo-Yo, a young woman who is first seen acting as a high priestess for a ceremony involving the miraculous healing powers of the little boy Alphonse.

In this period thriller set near the turn of the century, Jan Thoreau is a Canadian trapper who lives with his wife Marie in a small community in the wilderness not far from Hudson Bay. Blake is a disturbed drifter who has murdered a man and has found a way to frame Jan for his crime. Jan is out tending to his traps when an Indian friend with psychic talents tells him Marie is in grave danger. Jan hurries back, but he has no idea just how serious matters are until he arrives home -- Jan is wanted by the law for a crime he didn't commit, while Blake is hiding out in his home, and has taken Marie hostage.

A pimp and his seven working girls move to a small conservative mining town in northern Quebec to establish a brothel.

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

This documentary explores the economic, sociological, and cultural aspects of food systems and consumption in a major city, focusing on the disconnect between food production and consumption.

In this Gilles Carle feature documentary on the game of chess, the international chess match is cast as a classic Western shoot-out. Three chess greats dominate the film: Russia's Anatoly Karpov; Viktor Korchnoi, a Russian defector; and American Bobby Fischer. Chess aficionados Camille Coudari and Fernando Arrabal analyze the personalities and strategies of the players and comment on the interplay of politics and chess.

The illegitimate son of an Indian woman and a French Canadian man leaves home and is attacked when he tries to return.

In 1935, in a Quebec village, a boy observes with curiosity the little intrigues of the adult world.

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.

A young woman, living with her parents and siblings on a remote farm in harsh, picturesque northern Québec, has three suitors: a steady and unimaginative farmer, Eutrope, the Americanized and wealthy Lorenzo, who has sought his fortune in Boston, and François Paradis, a rough and virile logger who captures her heart despite the warnings of her parents and the village priest. For a year, marked by seasonal change in an atmosphere charged with the strangeness of Indians and the demons of the woods, we see Maria at work and prayer, struggling with decisions, choosing to stay in Canada, in love with François, seeking to change his rough behaviors, and dealing with extraordinary loss.

A series of very brief clips celebrates the 50th anniversary of the National Film Board of Canada.

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.

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.

With two shots from a rifle, the life of a man and his young son are forever changed. Jurgen Prochnow stars in this chilling tale of a man who is forced to seek justice on his own after his wife is brutally raped.

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 a lonely setting, a teenage girl dreams. She is bored, manifests childish rebellions: her nascent personality rears up and asserts itself. "Be our star," suggests a director of women's pages. What will this flight to the world of work bring to Solange?

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.

A worker, called in a hurry to remove the snow in the city street, try to buy his remaining gifts in the tumult of Christmas eve without quitting his work.

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.

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.

Stories and legends about the devil in the past and actual populations of the North America.