Gilles Carle

Gilles Carle, born in 1928 in Quebec, was a playwright, editor, producer, screenwriter, designer, painter and filmmaker. After his childhood in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, he moved to Montreal at the age of 16 to obtain a diploma in advertising and marketing, painting and art history at l'École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In the midst of the emergence of modernity in Quebec, he founded with others, in the 1950s, the editions de l'Hexagone, and then the journals L'écran and Liberté. In 1965, he established himself as one of the most important filmmakers in Quebec by signing his first fictional feature, The Merry World of Léopold Z at the NFB, diverted from a documentary commission. Sown by his employer for having transformed this documentary project into a feature film, he left the NFB in 1966 and founded his own production companies. Around fifteen films followed, including the now classics The Rape of a Sweet Young Girl (1968), The True Nature of Bernadette (1972), The Death of a Lumberjack (1973) and The Plouffe Family (1981). He creates a cinema where you can see yourself living and breathing, as people, as humans. A cinema where female characters are essential, interpreted by actresses who have all marked the life and work of the filmmaker, including Carole Laure, Micheline Lanctôt, Anne Létourneau and Chloé Sainte-Marie. Gilles Carle passed away on November 28 2009, alongside his partner and caregiver, Chloé Sainte-Marie, after a 28-year long degeneration due to Parkinson's disease.