Women-filmmakers

Metal and Melancholy

An endless ride from one taxi to another in 1990s Lima. So many people, so few ways to make a living in the country in crisis; each person tries their luck with a car on the verge of collapse. Life itself is there—condensed and somehow enchanted.

Okurimono

Noriko Oi, a Japanese Canadian who has lived in Montreal for more than 20 years, is preparing to return to Nagasaki, her hometown, to help her siblings clear out the family home that will soon be sold. Within the walls of this old house lie fragments of the Oi family’s history. Noriko decides to reconstruct the past of her mother, Mitsuko, an atomic bomb survivor, in the hope of coming to terms...

Nous sortirons de nos cuisines - Épisode 4 - Épilogue : on a réussi, mais on n’a pas fini (1982-2024)

Within the troupe, the wave of departures that began around _As-tu vu? Les maisons s’emportent!_ continues, and paths diverge. Activism is a never-ending task: sometimes, it’s exhausting. In 2006, thirty years after the March 8, 1976 speech that closes the first episode of _Nous sortirons de nos cuisines_, Québécois women won their battle for free access to abortion: from then on, voluntary ter...

The Other Rio

Le stade Maracanã brille de mille feux. Nous sommes en 2016, et toutes les caméras sont braquées sur l’inauguration des Jeux olympiques de Rio de Janeiro. À quelques rues de là, c’est un tout autre monde. Assis sur un toit, des gamins regardent de loin les feux d’artifice. Nous sommes dans un bâtiment fédéral en ruine, sous le joug des trafiquants. Là vivent une centaine de familles miséreuses,...

Morte avant rouge

Lobsters don't see themselves as red, we're the ones boiling them alive.

Beirut, My City

In 1982, Jocelyne Saab's 150-year-old family home burns down. In tandem with the Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf, she decided to travel through her city, which was under siege by the Israelis, and to report on the situation in Beirut, the departure of the Palestinians and the incomprehension of the civilians who were suffering from the war.

Nous sortirons de nos cuisines - Épisode 2 - Môman travaille pas, a trop d’ouvrage! (1974-75)

The UN declared 1975 the “International Women's Year,” ironically using the singular form in French (Année internationale de la femme). It was a pivotal time: more and more women were divorcing or entering the workforce. Yet a pregnancy was enough to justify dismissal, and maternity leave would not exist until 1979. The members of Théâtre des Cuisines returned to the stage with their second pla...

Nous sortirons de nos cuisines - Épisode 1 - Nous aurons les enfants que nous voulons (1968-74)

Montreal, 1973. Canadian law now permits abortion. But the criteria are very restrictive, and women depend on the goodwill—more often the ill will—of the men sitting on the committees that approve or deny them. Quebec is the province where it is most difficult to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and clandestine abortions are common: they are the leading cause of hospitalization among women. Yet...

Traces

Beirut, 1980. Amid the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film. An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.

Nyanga

During the colonial era, Gaspar Yanga was kidnapped from the African coast, brought to Mexico, and enslaved. Though forced to work on the master's plantation, he never stopped dreaming of freedom. Based on historical facts and using shadow theatre with hand-drawn animation, _Nyanga_ pays tribute to the resistance against the chains of colonialism.

Mother-To-Be

Can a woman fully realize herself while embracing the demands of motherhood? Filmed during an actual pregnancy and based on the journal director Anne Claire Poirier kept during one of her own, this documentary captures the pregnant female body, revealing the emotions and anxieties that accompany this transformative experience.

Comptines

Spring has arrived in the streets of Montreal. Little girls bring out their bolos, skipping ropes, elastics, and balls, playing joyfully to the rhythm of delightful rhymes. Freshness, spontaneity, innocence, joy and sorrow—it’s all there, in these little songs. A world that adults will be delighted to return to.