Coups de food

On Christmas Eve, two young women are stranded when their car breaks down.

They have nothing in commun but a peculiar fantasy. And tonight, they're gonna meet for the first time.

Martin finally believes he has sold a sweeper to a retiree who turns out to be a dangerous individual.

Nathalie thinks she's the sole survivor...

Since the 1990s, the old Gaulin Manor has housed erstwhile residents of Saint-Hyacinthe psychiatric hospital. Some thirty inhabitants occupy this alternative lodging space, their salvation after the wave of deinstitutionalization that one day threw them into the streets with no resources. Profit rules, and so this motel at the world's end will be destroyed to fill the pockets of promoters. The film captures this turning of the page, where each lost character reshuffles their daily life in moving on to the next chapter. Lending an ear to these forgotten outcasts, Manor is careful in framing these shadowy figures, bringing them to life in the light of our attention.

Edouard has hit rock bottom. The end of this day had not prepared him to discover the roots of his own mystery.

Filmmaker Claude Demers tells the story of his search for his biological mother and their eventual meeting. He does this in voice-over, accompanied by images from Canada's national archives. The painstakingly selected and fluidly edited black-and-white clips build up, like the perfectly fitting pieces of a puzzle; an impression of his mother as he had imagined her. How she grew up, worked, loved and left him.

To fill the absence of his six-year-old daughter living in Berlin, a Montreal filmmaker keeps a film diary which takes him back to his relationship with his adoptive father and his biological father, whom he never knew. His diary also becomes a reflection on cinema by revisiting the work of filmmakers who influenced him such as Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders. Diary of a Father is a poetic response to making the separation between a father and his child bearable.