B: December 19, 1943 in Montréal, Québec
Mireille Dansereau began her professional life as a dancer who turned her attention to filmmaking and began by studying at the Royal College of Art in London where she received an arts degree in cinema and television. She returned to Canada and worked at the National Film Board of Canada (BFB) in 1967 where she made her first short film Moi, un jour. She also worked at Radio Canada and Radio-Quebec (CBC). A pioneer in Québec film, she was a co-founder of L’Association Coopérative de Productions Audio-Visuelles (ACPAV), the production company behind her first feature, La vie rêvée (1972), which was the first fiction feature directed by a woman in Québec outside of the NFB. In 1987 she adapted Marie-Claire Blais’ poetically metaphoric novel Le Sourd dans la ville (Deaf to the City), which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. Programmers described it, in part, by writing “On paper this remarkable new film by Mireille Dansereau might resemble something unbearably dark and oppressive, but on screen it has a truly rare power: it is dark and oppressive, but it is also haunting, beautiful and full of indelible images.” |
