Quebec director Carole Laganière died Monday at the age of 64. “His films will remain, but his gaze will be missed,” said the Cinémathèque québécoise on social networks when announcing the filmmaker’s departure.
Documentary until his death — his last film, Fleewas released last September — Carole Laganière first became known for her works of fiction.
In 1989, while studying in Belgium, she made her first short film, Day offin which appears the fame Yolande Moreau, who was, at the time, still little known.
In this double award-winning drama in Belgium, the cameras are trained on the fictional call center SOS j’écoute. “We will remember her as a documentary filmmaker, but Carole was a gifted filmmaker, period. […] We can already see in this short film his interest in the human being, which was obvious”, confided in an interview to the Duty the director general of the Cinémathèque québécoise, Marcel Jean.
This “humanist” frame, “doubled with great intelligence”, will have guided all his work. The former film critic of Duty “Think for example of bride of life (2001), which is a film of great finesse in the way she manages to speak to us […] of the kind of taboo of death linked to childhood”.
Mme Laganière dared to address the end of life and illness in his works. In Absences (2013), his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, is on screen.
Carole Laganière, also ill in recent years, did not hesitate to “use the experience of her death to make a film”, says Marcel Jean. “I know that she was filming her passage. […] She had this commitment to her work, to cinema. It is something very beautiful. “A film presenting the last moments of his life could therefore be released posthumously.
The Cinémathèque québécoise plans to pay tribute to this “important figure of documentary cinema in Quebec” in the spring.