Paul Tana

Born in Italy in 1947, Paul Tana emigrated to Quebec with his family in 1958. After studying literature, he became interested in cinema in the 1970s. His films are influenced by his origins and often address the subject of the Italian community in Quebec, thus becoming the Italian voice of Quebec cinema. He directed his first feature film, Les grands enfants (1980). After a brief stint in television, he directed the documentary Caffè Italia, Montréal (1985). In 1988, he directed Le marchand de jouets, a medium-length film for Radio-Canada, and in 1992, La sarrasine, a feature-length fiction film presented at festivals in Berlin, Namur, Toronto, and Washington, among others. In 1998, he directed La déroute, presented at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois. In 2007, he coordinated Ricordati di noi (Remember Us), a restoration project of 30 years of audiovisual archives from Teledomenica, a historic Italian television show in Montreal. Ricordati di noi is also the title of the film he directed about this project, which became the first part of a namesake trilogy. In 2015, he completed Marguerita, a short documentary and the second part of the trilogy, presented at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in 2016. In 2019, also at the RVQC, he presented the third and final part of this project, Le figuier. Paul Tana has been teaching at the School of Media at UQAM since the late 1980s.