2012/Through the heart

A passionate and unpredictable film about three characters in love, Les Sauf-conduits explores the tenuous balance between friendship and romantic love. When three friends set out to break the world’s egg-tossing record, their relationships become increasingly entangled and complicated. In her arresting first film, director Manon Briand crafts poetic images that are striking, fresh and occasionally quirky, and elicits uncannily natural performances from her actors. Les Sauf-conduits garnered several awards on the festival circuit, including the award for Best Canadian Short Film at the 1992 Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival®) and Golden Sheaf Awards for Best Director and Best Film at the Yorkton Film Festival.

Exquisitely filmed in black-and-white, this experimental narrative follows four friends on a road trip as they discover the complicated arena of unseen desire that arises when ecstasy and sexuality mix.

The film tells the story of three couples on the road between the Atlantic coast and the Northwest Territories in Canada.

Male prostitution in a Montreal brothel run by a hard-nosed procuress.

In an ever-expanding but nondescript North American city, Christophe, a middle-aged businessman, unexpectedly encounters Micha, a Russian acrobat recovering from an injury, while house-hunting. An instant attraction is quickly consummated and they embark on a torrid affair that helps each of them cope with their respective trials. A provocative, poignant drama about intimacy in an age of anonymity.

An intimate and unflinching look over 12 months at the hardscrabble lives of hustlers in downtown Montreal.

The reality of addiction in a tough-minded docudrama set in the bleak milieu of hustlers and junkies in Montreal.

A strike at a sawmill in a small Canadian town puts Steph and Piston out of work. They want to resurrect their band but Marie-Lou, Piston's ex-wife and the band's former lead singer is not enthusiastic about the idea. Meanwhile Steph is having realtionship trouble with Rose, an older woman that he's been seeing and drifts first to Marie-Lou and then to Charles, who once left town but is now back.

Pierre and Elisabeth, a couple in their thirties, move with their baby into a cottage on a lake for the summer. The setting is idyllic, and the couple’s happiness seems within reach. Every day, Pierre goes to work in the city while Elisabeth rehearses for an upcoming voice recital. Despite the benevolent presence of her mother-in-law who lives in the neighbouring house, the young woman feels isolated and overwhelmed in her new role as a mother. Her entourage is concerned, but no one fully grasps the extent of Elisabeth’s distress. Muted violence soon takes hold and tightens its grip.

A cargo ship embarks on its final voyage of the year to resupply Inuit communities in the far north of Canada. During a storm off the coast of Labrador, the ship’s cook is found murdered in his cabin. With no way to identify the culprit among the twenty crew members, suspicion falls on Alupa, an Inuit mechanic and close friend of the victim. Unfolding in reverse, from the investigation back to the night of the storm and the murder, the film transcends the boundaries of a traditional whodunit to probe deeper questions of race, class, and sexual desire.

A woman walks through an arid and desert-like place. She seems to have come out of nowhere. Her journey is punctuated with chance meetings and many unforssen obstacles. She crosses a forest and a marsh before continuing along her desert path. She will never be the same again.

Ron recites a poem by Baudelaire from a book he's found on the street. Ti-Red, fresh out of prison, combs every inch of the district in search of his homeless native girlfriend. Marco and Rob, high on crack, have to figure out how to get more money. Daguy, a homeless artist, who has been camping out at the Occupy Montreal camp, wants to find a place to sleep out of the cold. Meanwhile, a spontaneous demonstration is raging in town to protest yet again against the murder by the police of a homeless man. This film retraces the trajectory of seven men in downtown Montreal, the body being their only tool in their attempt to remain alive with some dignity.

"Rodrigue Jean gives voice to people who have nearly drowned. The story of their disaster and the lessons they have drawn from it make us think that life is born of water and flows somewhat like a river. We are born in a state something like a spring. This spring becomes a stream, we travel through forests, winding our way around obstacles to finally arrive at the river where our water merges with other water, like a new and clear consciousness. There is a proverb which states that great rivers are made up of small streams. In this way we all contribute to something that is greater than us and which carries us along to something even greater still." Herménégilde Chiasson

A man murders his dying lover. He drowns him in a tub of water. We drift through the man's mind in the hours after the death. He falls more and more deeply into layers of memory. La mémoire de l'eau is a tale of fear, love and grief set in a world of uncertain boundaries.

This film traces a geography of the soul of ten men whose spirit flickers above the contemporary wreckage of life.

A child of the Beat Generation, Gérald Leblanc conjoined urban-ness and American-ness, wandering and belonging, far beyond the boundaries of taboo. In so doing, he helped propel Acadia into the modern era.