Pierre Perrault

Four young men who belong to a supernatural legacy are forced to battle a fifth power long thought to have died out. Another great force they must contend with is the jealousy and suspicion that threatens to tear them apart.

A documentary film about a group of hunters who gather annually to hunt moose near Maniwaki, Quebec.

After the death of her mother, a teenage girl is faced with bizarre supernatural occurrences when her mother's estranged sister arrives and begins to infiltrate her and her father's lives.

A business man plans to dump toxic waste on a state park, but it doesn't go according to plan.

Did Cartier dream of making a country from this land of a million birds? In his records of his exploration he certainly marvelled at seeing the great auks that have since disappeared from Isle aux Ouaiseaulx, the razor-bills and gannets that are gone from Blanc-Sablon, and the kittiwakes from Anticosti, all the winged creatures of all the islands which he described as being "as full of birds as a meadow is of grass". And that's not even counting the countless snow geese.

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.

Not far from the North Pole on Ellesmere Island, for one hundred and twenty days, a watchful camera stalks a beast of fleece and hoof, the ancient musk-ox, in anticipation of the great bull's duel for dominance. By the light of late summer, in the hush of expectation of mating behaviour, battle is joined between the furry combatants.

Feature documentary on the agricultural Abitibi. This film is a real plea for the earth and for a more human kind of life in the face of a society that has become cold and insensitive.

Pierre Perrault takes Stéphane-Albert Boulais (from 'The Bright Beast', one of his films) to discover Saint-Malo and Jacques Cartier, in preparation for the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada (1534-1984). City tour with guide. Examination of Cartier's "Relations" and testimonies from the life of Falklands sailors, in an attempt to reconstruct his journey, his life, his time. Dialogue across the Atlantic between Saint-Malo and Île-aux-Coudres, the discoverer's mooring place. Who was Cartier? Who does it belong to? The discussion is open.

From the bottom of the Baie aux Feuilles, itself in the hollow of Ungava bay, at the summer solstice, a filmmaker is on the lookout. His camera scans the tundra, looking for a herd of muskox stubbornly refusing to be targeted - even by a documentary. A film which illustrates the thoughts of a humanist who is insatiably curious.

This documentary produced for TV follows a project consisting in remaking the journey of discoveries in the footsteps of Cartier's book. Sailors, some from Saint-Malo, others from the river, were entrusted with the care of navigation.

The people of Ile-aux-Coudres talk of their fading tradition of constructing boats to ride the seas.

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.

Feature-length documentary on Hauris Lalancette, a Quebecer from Abitibi, who travels and draws surprising parallels between two corners of the country that are considered destitute and left behind. It is also about the search for ancestors and the nostalgia for old jobs that were better, both on the human level and on the technical level.

Four years after Pour la suite du monde (1963), director Pierre Perrault asks Alexis Tremblay if he'll agree to travel with his wife Marie to the country of their ancestors, France. In a montage parallel, we follow them in France and listen to them talking to their friends about it.

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.

Feature-length documentary as part of Pierre Perrault's Abitibian Cycle. The filmmaker questions the past and present of Abitibi and draws up, face to face, the promises of colonization in the 1930s and the great disappointment caused by the closing of the land in the 1970s. There are witnesses to the heroic era, including the cultivator Hauris Lalancette, as well as extracts from films by Father Maurice Proulx (1934-1940).

Shows Tête-à-la-Baleine, Québec, a village with a double life--one on the North Shore mainland during winter months, the other on mossy islands of the Gulf to which the entire population moves for summer fishing.

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.

It is a documentary joining 3 periods of filming in the Mouchouanipi, which is a faraway land in the North of eastern Canada.

A look at November 15, 1976, the date the Parti Québécois seized power in the provincial elections, a victory that gave rise to an unprecedented outburst of joy at the Center Paul-Sauvé, a place where PQ sympathizers gathered.

On an island the road ends where it begins, at the wharf. The wharf is the link to the rest of the world, until winter cuts it off. But the islanders know the winter sea and its movements. They judge the ice by its colours, avoiding the open channels, fighting through the slushy fragil ice, catching their footing on the chunk ice, and running all-out across the solid ice to the North Shore.

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.