The Joy of Winter

Two youngsters, a boy and girl barely into their teens, set up housekeeping together after dropping out of school. They have very little money and end up living in a rooming house. They spend their time playing, coming up with slogans, and writing them on available walls. Their relationship is mostly fraternal, so the boy doesn't understand the girl's jealousy when he begins receiving attention from an older woman. When the girl undertakes drastic measures, he begins to understand. This Canadian film is in French, with a French director.

One of the most popular Lebanese films of the late 1990s, Around the Pink House is a story that explores the changing urban landscape of Beirut after the Civil War. La maison rose (the pink house) is an old mansion in Beirut where the Nawfal family found shelter during the Civil War. Unfortunately for them, their immediate environment is rapidly changing, as many of the old shell-ridden buildings are being torn down and replaced by new construction projects. When Mattar, the owner of the pink house, decides to sell it to make room for a large commercial centre, the residents of the neighbourhood become divided between the shopkeepers and businessmen in favour of a different kind of modernity.

This documentary takes us on a journey of discovery through the words of young girls, members of the work team at Wuchang station, who spontaneously answer the filmmaker's questions. In these words and confidences, a concern emerges: to be first and foremost at the service of the Chinese people. Collective life takes priority over individual or family life. And when you get married, you agree to see your spouse only when their respective workplaces and schedules coincide...

Made in collaboration with the Inuit Tungavingat Nunamini, this film focuses on those dissident members of the Inuit community who rejected the agreement signed on November 11, 1975, between the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, the Québec and federal governments, the James Bay Energy Corporation, the James Bay Development Corporation, Hydro-Québec and the Grand Council of the Crees, which took away Native rights to a territory of almost one million square kilometres. By their words and actions, the dissident Inuit of Povungnituk, Ivujivik and Sugluk express their strong desire to retain their land and their traditions. The filmmakers go into their homes, on the ice and the sea to record first-hand the lives of these northern people.

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".

In a poor neighborhood, teenagers plot an assassination while a party is being organized for the local usurer.

In Quebec 40s, orphans or abandoned children are placed in a gigantic psychiatric hospital where children were locked. Were they sick? No, they simply had no family. To escape this oppressive universe, they created a parallel world: the institution's basement where, in a maze of tunnels, they founded an independent company, with its rituals, spells. A young girl, Agnes, reigns over this underground world that adults seem to tolerate.

Documentary

Tragicomic portrait of a bar's owners and patrons in a poor Montreal neighbourhood.

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 woman attempts to resume her place in the family that she abandoned years earlier.