Inside Québec – May 2008
Inside Québec – May 2008
by Maurie Alioff
Everyone Used to be Happy
Set in 1966, Léa Pool’s Maman est chez le coiffeur opens light and breezy as summer begins for teenage Élise (Marianne Fortier) and her kid brothers. The veteran auteur’s new picture darkens when their journalist mother (Céline Bonnier) announces that if she doesn’t check out of their idyllic country home and take a posting in London, she will die. The impact on the family is immediate. Brother Coco (Élie Dupuis) becomes even more obsessively focused on the go-kart he’s assembling in the garage. More disturbingly, Benoit (Hugo St-Onge-Paquin), who in an early scene shows mom his drawing of her as a powerful queen, smashes toys and tailspins into self-destructive withdrawal. French actor Laurent Lucas (With a Friend Like Harry) plays the father as a fussy medical professional, whose initial reaction to his wife’s abandonment is childish regression.
Pool and screenwriter Isabelle Hébert work up real empathy, not just for the idiosyncratic central characters, but also for their friends and neighbours, most of whom suffer their own wounds. Other people’s gardens are not any greener, dad tells his kids. For Élise, at an age when she’s delighting in her first sexual rituals, the charmed fairy tale she once lived fractures into a world of troubled souls. One of them is M’sieu Mouche (Gabriel Arcand), a man-child who crafts beautiful fishing lures, and may be dangerous to children.The movie’s fairy-tale atmosphere, complete with its own comical Wicked Witch of the East, is heightened by exquisite visuals of Quebec’s Richelieu Valley. The film’s Switzerlandian look alludes to The Sound of Music, and one of Élise’s friends dresses like he’s in it. With the exception of judiciously chosen American cars and a couple of pop songs – like Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill, Pool deploys “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” – the Swiss-born director’s world seems closer to the countryside near Berne than a North American locale.
Also opening in May, Charles Binamé’s Le piège américain is an ambitious picture about mythic gangster Lucien Rivard. The criminal’s trajectory took him from pre-revolutionary Cuba, where he knew Jack Ruby, the murderer of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, to breaking out of prison in Montreal. In James Ellroy’s obsessively convoluted novel, American Tabloid, the French-Canadian character Pete Bondurant, a professional criminal involved in the Kennedy assassination, is based partly on Rivard. Released in April, Philippe Gagnon’s sci-fi spoof, Dans une galaxie près de chez nous 2, enjoyed an opening weekend that yielded better box office than North America’s top grosser, The Forbidden Kingdom. A week later, the sequel’s returns hit $1 million.
What the Hell is Going On?
As the most vicious winter in 30 years finally loosened its grip, three stormy dramas became the focus of media attention and industry chatter. A respected filmmaker engaged in an exhausting battle with a prominent producer; an indie distributor collided with exhibition giant Cineplex Entertainment; and the new owners of Télévision Quatre-Saisons pitted themselves against everyone from union members to politicians in all three major political parties. Prolific feature film and TV director Giles Walker first hooked up with producer Claudio Luca (The Boys of St. Vincent, The Last Chapter) to shoot Il Duce Canadese (2004), a mini-series about the internment of Italian-Canadians during World War II. The smooth collaboration prompted Luca to hire Walker for another show: an ambitious 12 hour look at one of Quebec’s most revered and complicated figures, René Lévesque.In an interview Walker told me he was first surprised, and then distressed that Luca “seemed to be increasingly unhappy” throughout the demanding, but gratifying shoot. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked staff producers. Eventually, the director submitted his cut, assuming that Luca would follow the showrunner’s routine of preserving what he liked and re-assembling what he didn’t. Walker also assumed that the remainder of his fees, about $126 000, would be paid, “according to my contract.” Instead, a letter from Ciné Télé Action 2, the company set up to produce the series, informed Walker that the agreement had been “nullified.”During arbitration, Luca argued that he had to save a substandard show in postproduction. Walker says that he assembled DVDs showing that “90% of the series was derived directly from the work that (editor) Jean Beaudoin and I had done.” The arbitrator rejected Luca’s arguments, as well as a countersuit for $270 000 that would have devastated Walker financially if he had lost.At this point, there have been three judgments, including from Quebec’s Superior Court, against Luca. Walker says he’s proud of his work, and points out that unlike his well received take on the independentiste icon, which won lead actor Emmanuel Bilodeau a best performance Gémeaux, Luca’s recently aired follow-up got slammed by the French media and the legendary politician’s colleagues.“Now I see what it is that the producer wanted.” says Walker. “It’s a form of hyper-drama, which I wouldn’t do.” The quarrel cranked up into its own hyper-drama when Walker and Quebec District Council of the Directors Guild of Canada (QDC) had bailiffs seize the film negative, digital master and sound material of the first series. Intending a “judicial auction” of these materials, as well as the copyright, the QDC also formally complained about Luca to the Association des producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec (APFTQ). At publication time, the producer has not backed off from his position that he incurred extra expenses to finish the series, and that Walker cost him a fortune in legal fees.
Popcorn, Nachos, and Cinema d’auteur
In early April, Cineplex Entertainment aborted its planned May programming of a hit French comedy on screens in Montreal and Quebec City. In addition to yanking Un baiser s’il vous plaît, Cineplex also pulled the French version of the doc, Up the Yangtze, (which recently picked up a rave review in the NY Times) from a Montreal cinema.Cineplex was punishing Up the Yangtze’s producers and K-Films Amérique, Quebec distributor of Un baiser s’il vous plaît, because they had offered the films to a regional exhibition network called Réseau Plus. A non-profit, government-subsidized amalgamation of lo-fi screening venues, Réseau Plus plays mainly arthouse pictures in colleges and community centres located in various regions, some of them so remote, the last picture show palace faded out long ago. The operation commands a tiny share of the Quebec market. For Cineplex, and for Quebec’s Association des Propriétaires de Cinémas et Cinéparcs (APCCQ), commercial exhibitors have inalienable first run rights to the movies they screen. Rules are rules. What Cineplex failed to grasp is Quebec’s long history of not-for-profit Ciné-Clubs making film art available to people who would otherwise be deprived of it. Renowned moviemakers committed to their vocation after seeing work by Fellini, Godard, or Samuel Fuller in their local clubs.Reacting quickly, K-Films Amérique’s respected founder, Louis Dussault, lacerated Cineplex in the newspapers. Numerous industry players weighed in with their views, debating arcane fine points regarding commercial and non-commercial exhibition. In the normally acrimonious National Assembly, both the government and its opposition agreed that Réseau Plus is a jewel in Quebec’s cultural crown.The most passionate interventions came from eminent producer Rock Demers and longtime reparatory cinema operator, Roland Smith. Now running Montreal’s beloved Cinéma du Parc, Smith called theatre owners “nothing more than sellers of popcorn and nachos,” insisting that like all businessmen, they “have a social responsibility.” For its part, APCCQ press releases insisted that the supposedly idealistic, government-subsidized Réseau Plus is nothing more than “unfair competition.”Eventually, Culture and Communications Minister Christine St-Pierre set up a group to forge agreements between Réseau Plus and the APCCQ. And probably getting jittery about the unrest in Quebec, Cineplex Entertainment met with Rock Demers and Louis Dussault. The exchange resulted in an agreement that the distributor could offer films to alternate venues if they were not programmed by commercial theatres within a “reasonable time.”
The Black Sheep Has Teeth
The first harbinger was the resignation of Télévision Quatre-Saisons president René Guimond soon after film production and distribution house Remstar put in a bid to buy the ailing TV network, nicknamed the “black sheep.” The moment had arrived, said Guimond, to hand over the reins to someone else.Soon after, Remstar execs Julien and Maxime Rémillard announced details of their re-structuring plan. While the Réseau Plus mêlée (see above) aggravated people, Remstar’s most dramatic announcement set off shock waves. Not only would the Remillards cut deeply into TQS personnel, they intended to eliminate news gathering and reporting operations by September. Before the Black Sheep could say Baa, the story was on front pages. TQS’ union protested to TV and Radio watchdog, the CRTC. Quebec premier Jean Charest, backed by all the parties in the National Assembly, called on the government regulator to insist that the network adhere to its current license requirements and broadcast news. Remstar claims that its competitors offer more than enough coverage. But everyone else seems to think that an information blackout would descend on regional viewers if TQS, which has been criticized for the inadequacy and superficiality of its reporting, shut down its newsrooms. The CRTC will mull over Remstar’s plans in early June.
Go RDS!
As the Montreal Canadiens showed more hockey smarts than it has in years, Quebeckers attached Habs flags to their cars and tripped on visions of the Stanley Cup. One guy I crossed paths with pointed to the Canadiens’ logo shaved onto the back of his head. One can only speculate about where female fans prone to body embellishment expressed their hope that the team would rack up enough playoff wins to compete in the ultimate game. Cable sports channel RDS is a major beneficiary of the Habs’ success. Never before has a specialty outlet so dominated the Quebec market in time slots normally controlled by conventional broadcasters. For instance, an average of 2 million viewers watched RDS’ telecast of the 7th and final game between Montreal and Boston, the number rising to 3 million in the final moments. The 6th game topped the audience for the 1993 Stanley Cup, and some ratings were better than pan-Canadian numbers for CBC hockey broadcasts.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and teaches screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, his articles have appeared in various publications including The Montreal Mirror and The New York Times. He is Northernstars.ca’s Québec Correspondent.
what production company would buy into such a wacky fable?In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Lanctôt played opposite Richard Dreyfuss as Duddy’s French-Canadian girlfriend. One of the few indelible characters in Canadian film, Yvette’s sunny and loving disposition gets seriously challenged by Duddy’s manias and double-crosses.During the filming of the Oscar-nominated picture, Lanctôt hooked up with director Ted Kotcheff and eventually lived with him in L.A. Since returning to Montreal in 1980, she has been a prolific actress, playing on TV and in movies that include Denys Arcand’s 
Suzie reunites Lanctôt with Bussières, this time taking on the role of a confused fortysomething. Early on, she abandons her autistic son (Gabriel Gaudreault) in the back of a cab driven by the film’s title character. Suzie (Lanctôt herself) is a 58-year-old who’s been in mourning since her husband skipped town with her daughter, and took her with him to Morocco. Like Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, the only way Suzie can handle the pain of the night is by driving a cab through it. Like Taxi Driver, the movie is all about shots of a cab sleep-driving through city streets. Neon colours bleed into each other; sodium lamplight flares off the windshield. Suzie emerges a little from her mute, quasi-catatonic state when she decides she has to do something about 10-year-old Charles, a strange, difficult 10-year-old, who according to his father (Normand Daneau), is an “extra-terrestrial.”Lanctôt’s entire movie tracks one long, dark night of the soul. In fact, it happens to be Halloween night, and urban demons are everywhere, hounding Suzie and Charles. At one point, the woman and the boy descend into a purgatorial all night poker game presided over by a female dealer wearing a cowboy hat and big, bad dark glasses (inimitable rock ‘n’ roll singer 
ambiguous moment of triumph, the kid plays and wins repeatedly, arousing suspicions that could turn nasty.In another key scene, Charles’ parents, Viviane and Pierre, engage in an interminable, over-acted shouting match, so long that when I returned to the theatre after an emergency trip to a distant men’s room, they were still at it. As the long night’s journey nears its end, cops intervene, and in the flat light of a police station, some kind of resolution occurs. But we have no idea whether the 10-year-old boy, or the 58-year-old woman, will ever escape their mute anguish. In Lanctôt’s comments about her movie, which even when it’s misfiring benefits from her image choices and tightly controlled performance, she quotes a line from Pink Floyd: “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.”
support to people living with Parkinson’s and related diseases.Carle, now in an advanced stage of PD, made it to the launch of the DVD set at the Montreal rep house, the Cinéma du Parc. As usual, his conjoint, singer Chloé Sainte-Marie, was by his side, and Micheline Lanctôt read a tribute that quoted a celebrated line from John Ford’s 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In Ford’s elegy for a dying era, a newspaper editor says to James Stewart, “This is the West, sir, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”Lanctôt linked her first director to Ford because there’s a wild western feel to Carle films like Red (1970). As for the editor’s dictum, “it could apply to you, dear Gilles,” Lanctôt read from her text. “In your life and every one of your films, who better than you has known how to transform the real into the magnificent crucible of your singular imagination – you the surrealist, the lover, the living.”Not only has Carle’s lively spirit challenged stuffy conventions, he was, as Lanctôt pointed out, “the first truly popular Quebec director, the first fiction director to compete in Cannes, the first and the only to create heroines larger than nature.” Carle was the first in everything, and that’s part of his legend. For Lanctôt, even though he is now silent, he remains an inspiration.
who continually takes apart and re-builds the old cars he stashes at the end of a country road.It’s a no-brainer to predict that Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère will be a hot item in Cannes and sizzle for months to come – especially if it’s as bold as its title. Dolan, a onetime child actor who dubbed Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley for the French versions of the Harry Potter films, began writing I Killed My Mother when he was 17. At 19, failing to secure backing from Telefilm Canada and Quebec’s SODEC, he financed production with his own acting money. Once the film was almost complete, SODEC came on board, and recently a representative of the French sales agent operation, Rézo Film, flew to Montreal to grab world rights.In his debut as a writer-director, Dolan plays the lead, a young gay man who doesn’t get along very well with mom. Dolan, who cultivates massive wavy pompadours and a sulky expression, suggests a cross between Johnny Depp and 1950’s star, Sal Mineo. He freely admits that the relationship he depicts is based on his own problems with his actual mother and told entertainment journalist Brendan Kelly that things have improved, especially after he stopped living with her.
Africa International Film Festival.While in Montreal, Lee promised to return when a new version of the venerable arthouse, the Cinéma Parallèle, opens in a new culture venue slated to be constructed on a lot facing the St. Laurent Boulevard métro station. The Parallèle was originally housed in tiny storefront locations on The Main until it became integrated into the imposing mdeia art palace, Ex-Centris. The cinema is still there even though Ex-Centris founder Daniel Langlois shut off the projectors in two adjacent theatres, a blackout mourned by cinephiles who showed up on the last night for candle-lit funeral rites.The indie film scene fears that the Parallèle’s days are numbered, which is why Claude Chamberlan, who co-created it and the Festival du nouveau cinéma years ago, has been scrambling to find a stable location. Spike Lee would show up at a launch because he’s dealt with Chamberlan since the 1960’s when his buddy Claude was among the first to program his work.With typically ebullient whimsy, Chamberlan shot off a release headed FIRST SUBWAY STATION DEDICATED TO WORLD CINEMA, as if movie geeks would be catching Iranian animation and the latest Coen Brothers flick as trains roared by on the Green Line. “Paris has its Louvre metro station,” Chamberlan wrote, “Montreal now has the unique opportunity to have a metro station dedicated to cinema.” When Yoko Ono made her much-anticipated entrance at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, the scene was right out of Fellini. Still cameras flashed and camcorder monitors multiplied her image as she sat down for a press conference backed by 
sky and clouds through the MMFA’s big windows. John Lennon’s widow wore a black suit and hat tilted at a rakish angle, her shades, as always, inexplicably perched on the tip of her nose.For a few minutes, Ono fielded questions about the exhibition, Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko. Running until June 21 free of charge, it’s a multimedia show of film, video, photographs, drawings, and interactive pieces, some of it originals, and some copies. Haunted by the constantly repeating sound of John’s voice calling to his Yoko, the exhibition radiates out from the couple’s War Is Over bed-in, the 1969 happening in Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. To promote world peace, John and Oko lolled around in their pyjamas, talking to an endless stream of reporters, supporters, and detractors. John composed “Give Peace a Chance” and recorded it with whoever happened to be in their suite.During the media preview that followed Ono’s press conference, I sat down on the replica of the big white bed. A photographer who was prowling around the exhibition aimed her camera at me. She wore her jet black hair in bangs and shades covered her eyes. I slipped on my shades and flashed the peace V. She smiled, clicked, and gave me a thumbs up. It was a shot she wanted.
festival. Dolan was buttressed by his implacable faith in the value of his work, the excitement the film generated back home, his movie star looks, and the most in-your-face title for a Canadian film since 
way she leaves specks of cheese on her chin when she eats a bagel. Later in the film, the fact that she never heard of Jackson Pollock really bugs him.Hubert rants and raves, cutting up his mother with his razor sharp verbal skills. Hubert is “special” as Chantale, a soft-spoken woman with a vague resemblance to 1960’s era Shirley Maclaine, told him when he was younger. But now she is wary of her brilliant brat and often intimidated by his tantrums, which can abruptly morph into inflamed professions of love. As the story develops, Chantale discovers what the audience already knows: her son is gay. The plot turn brings on a new level of estrangement between mother and son, complicating the oedipal undercurrents.I killed My Mother is a low budget film with minimalist but alluring production values. It swings between rapid-fire closeup montages, occasional dream sequences, and many two-shot duets – between Hubert and Chantale, Hubert and his lover Antonin Rimbaud (François Arnaud), Hubert and a teacher (Suzanne Clément), who appreciates his “fragile poetry from another era,” and empathizes with his troubles. Whatever the movie’s strengths and limitations, Xavier Dolan has pulled off something rare in Canadian filmmaking. Much of the movie’s appeal derives from Dolan the actor’s glamorous, often shirtless physical presence. He looks like a hybrid of young Johnny Depp and doomed 1950’s teenstar, Sal Mineo.It’s no exaggeration to say that I killed My Mother wouldn’t be the same film without its star’s abundant black hair, often worn in a wavy tumble over his left eye. Looking at the topless, bushy-haired baby in the movie’s poster, a friend of mine observed that when Dolan was a child, his hair probably weighed more than he did.
spilling over onto his kitchen table as he consumes his meals. In a picture almost free of dialogue, Colmor says at one point, “I have 4000 old cars in my heart.”Throughout the movie, Colmor is Mr. Busy. He unpacks debris, piles it up, throws things into the back of crumbling hatchbacks, and transports them from one spot to another. He hammers, screws and clanks as birds sing, crickets chirp, and Mahler occasionally swells up on the soundtrack. For some reason, his idea of chilling out is trying to learn Spanish from an old vinyl record.At about the midpoint, a group of intellectually challenged kids mysteriously show up. They dig holes, play with a rifle, and make out with each other. When Jean-Paul approaches them with an ax, you get the impression they might be a threat. But in Carcasses, you’re never really sure what anybody is trying to accomplish.Jean-Paul’s world is sculptural, textural, a garden of debris tended by an obsessive. Is he a madman? An avant-garde artist who merges with his own creations? At one point, a photographer appears and takes shots of the photogenic clutter, reminding us that there’s a random aesthetic worth noting here. Following the movie’s Cannes press screening, Côté said, “It was a silent reception, maybe cold. I don’t know what went on in the viewers’ heads. I find that exciting.”
Mother by cutting Telefilm Canada’s budget, even though Telefilm didn’t put a cent into the movie. Sadly, warm feelings cooled when Quebec’s auditor-general, Renaud Lachance, accused the man who runs the highly respected funding agency SODEC of enjoying an unnecessarily “sumptuous” lifestyle on the public dime. While Jean Guy Chaput was still on the Croisette, working the festival with his team, Lachance recited a litany of offences: Chaput’s $1300 a night Cannes suite, $80,000 in unreceipted expenses for last fall’s Cinéma du Québec event in Paris, the agency spending $22,750 between April 2006 and December 2008 for 181 meals, and so on.At a press conference, Chaput tried to erect a line of defense, insisting that Lachance’s complaints were unjustified. For instance, an agency chief needs a suite for business meetings, and the $80,000 paid for events on the ultra-expensive Champs-Elysées. Media reports claimed that in the past, Chaput clashed with certain individuals who were out to settle accounts with him. Some insiders argued that agency bigwigs often book the best, and in any case, there are no clear parameters set for them.However, for Christine St-Pierre, Chaput has “no more moral authority to run SODEC,” and apparently, Premier Jean Charest has been fuming over the embarrassing incident. At the end of May, the SODEC Board of Directors unanimously recommended that the beleaguered President vacate his SODEC offices before his current mandate ends in October.
Shoe. As an actor, Picard usually works in a grim realist mode far removed from Babine’s source material: story-teller Fred Pellerin’s live one-man-show, Il faut prendre le taureau par les contes (You Have to Grab the Bull by the Stories).An ardent Quebec nationalist, Picard played an FLQ kidnapper in Pierre Falardeau`s Octobre (1994) and the martyred 19th century patriot hero François-Marie-Thomas de Lorimier in the same director’s 15 février 1839 (2001). He won a Genie for his scary incarnation of a murderous cult leader in Savage Messiah (2002) and was a terminal alcoholic in Bernard Émond’s 20h17 Rue Darling. For L’audition, Picard’s writing and directorial debut, he cast himself as an unhappy thug who prefers acting to beating the crap out of losers who annoy his boss.On the other hand, 
appearance of a giant flying bull. When the new curé (Alexis Martin) arrives in the village, the vicious fanatic makes more than one attempt to hang the melancholy, haplessly romantic Babine. Another eccentric, Toussaint Brodeur (Picard), tries his best to protect the boy, who is, of course, an emblem of innocence in stark contrast with the kind of theological totalitarianism that poisoned Quebec`s real past. Distributor Alliance-Vivafilm`s decision to release Babine on the cusp of the holiday season positions it as a family picture. Even the film’s dark edge and sexual shenanigans are mild compared to Careful’s rooting around in mother-son incest and other deviations. As I write, the Quebec film industry`s hope that Babine will rake in a pot of gold is being nurtured by the film`s first ten days of box-office. Playing on 76 screens, Picard’s fable earned over $1 million, and ranked 2nd in the province, just after Twilight. Whether or not this unconventional picture will score as big as Quebec’s hit comedies remains to be seen. Whatever the numbers, Babine, which Picard dedicated “to our fathers,” is a guaranteed award-winner that will trigger plenty of learned analysis. As for other recent releases, Simon Lavoie’s Le déserteur (
collaboration with Éric Tessier, whose 2003 adaptation of Sénécal’s chiller Sur le seuil also rooted around in a world of psychopathic violence. Tessier’s latest features rising star Marc-André Grondin as the victim of Sénécal’s demonic family. Grondin’s irresistible performance in Jean-Marc Vallé’s 2005 hit 
colour of choice for boho artistes, and Johnny Depp contemplated Paris in the eyes of Vanessa Paradis. Meanwhile, Vallé’s look at Queen Victoria`s youth, a movie crediting Sarah Ferguson and Martin Scorsese as producers, is being prepped for its imminent release.Another coming attraction, Léa Pool`s Une belle mort (A Beautiful Death), began shooting in mid-November. An adaptation of a novel by veteran journalist Gil Courtemanche (Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali), the movie removes Pool from the youthful characters she`s been exploring since 1999`s ode to teenage female turmoil, Emporte-moi (Set Me Free). In the darkly-toned new picture, the value of a sick old man`s broken life is debated during a family reunion. A while back, Pool complained to me that Telefilm Canada doubted the project even though Quebec culture agency SODEC was eager to fund it. But now both institutions are invested in what turned out to be the first official coproduction between Canada and Luxembourg, where Une belle mort has been filming.
Corp, Robinson Sucroe looked like a knock-off of Robinson Curiosité, an animated show the artist had pitched to Cinar co-founders Micheline Charest and her husband Ron Weinberg. Not only did Robinson head for the nearest RCMP office and launch a multi-million dollar lawsuit that finally arrived in a Montreal courtroom last September and will be argued there until the spring, he obsessively investigated Cinar. Robinson`s relentless probing, along with other inquiries, eventually revealed that Canada`s purveyor of non-violent, moralistic kiddie TV was guilty of “total amorality,” Robinson’s lawyer says to Pelletier.Cinar`s sins included breaking tax credit rules by hiring American writers who hid behind Canadian names; siphoning money from the publicly traded company to pay for private luxuries; and sneaking $122 million (US) of company assets into personal investments. Fake companies, documents, and signatures flourished. Eventually, Charest and Weinberg agreed to paying huge financial settlements, but without admitting to any wrongdoing, or even facing criminal charges, let alone doing time. No current government agency types would speak to Pelletier for her film, but ex-Telefilm Canada head Peter Pearson says about the couple’s tax credit offences, “To construct them as monsters in this environment, I think is a misconstruction. And it didn’t matter what they were doing. They were doing what everybody else was doing.”Francine Pelletier’s The Woman Who Lost Herself suggests that Charest’s heavyweight political connections may have protected her and Weinberg from a fate like Conrad Black’s. The doc also questions why a woman 
who turned a mom and pop distribution operation into a world-class production company would jeopardize the domain she so carefully constructed.The tightly-structured film packs in copious information about the product of an affluent and pampered background in Quebec city. You can recognize the woman`s sharply-angled, intensely focused face in childhood photos. An aunt says that Charest had everything, but always wanted more faster. She would cut her hair short to enhance her performance in the New York City marathon.In the summer of 2003, I almost had a close encounter with Charest. I taped an on-camera interview about Cinar for Peter Rowe`s Popcorn and Maple Syrup, a doc about Canadian film, and left the studio just before she came in for hers. It was to be her last interview. Charest, who according to a relative had “a lot of masculine energy, but not a lot of heart,” opted for multiple procedures during an April 14 2004 cosmetic surgery her friends thought she didn’t really need. She may have died that day because she was in a rush to accomplish too much too soon.
a Quebec family’s quest to escape icy Montreal for the El Dorado of motel ownership in Hollywood, Florida, a resort town that is to Quebeckers what Miami Beach once meant for Jews. The cast includes 
back money? It’s a poison pill, and I don’t think they really thought about that.”
Sébastien (
Remstar was bankrolled by their father, “waste management” kingpin Lucien Remillard (pictured at right). As producers, the Rémillards have come up with international co-ventures like Head in the Clouds and Battle in Seattle, (both starring Charlize Theron) and Québécois titles like 
their houses. A competitive event, FIFA’s Grand Prize went to Netherlands moviemaker Jeroen Berkvens’ The Father, the Son and, the Talent, a doc about a jazz guitarist whose drug addiction has endangered gifts that have been compared to the legendary Django Reinhardt’s.
