Céline Baril

Céline Baril is a Quebecois director born in Gentilly in 1953. A graduate of the Université du Québec à Montréal in visual arts, she has mounted several large-scale solo exhibitions. Her work, which most often integrates sculpture, photography, and video, naturally led her to cinema. For more than a decade, the two careers she pursued simultaneously enriched each other. In 1989, she produced and directed her first experimental film, Barcelone, which was followed by two more experimental films. The Ant and the Volcano (1992) is a black-and-white fiction featuring non-professional actors of Chinese origin. Next came The Absent One (1997), a film written and shot using several photo albums of the same family found at the Paris flea market. This first feature film gave significant space to narrative, paving the way for her first fiction film, Games of the Heart (2001), which admirably captures the fragility and humanity of a youth often depicted as disillusioned. Between 2001 and 2003, the filmmaker directed several short fiction films. She spent a year in a secondary school in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Montreal for Life Times 538 (2005), her first feature-length documentary produced by the NFB. In 2009, she directed the feature-length documentary The Theory of Everything. Her film 24 Davids was the opening film of the 20th edition of the RIDM in 2017.