Movies: Pierre Perrault

From the bottom of the Baie aux Feuilles, itself in the hollow of Ungava bay, at the summer solstice, a filmmaker is on the lookout. His camera scans the tundra, looking for a herd of muskox stubbornly refusing to be targeted - even by a documentary....

Man's need to create beauty, to interpret the world around him in image and color, has found expression in many forms, from the days of primitive culture to the present. This film surveys the work of Canadian craftsmen in many fields, showing how the...

It is a documentary joining 3 periods of filming in the Mouchouanipi, which is a faraway land in the North of eastern Canada....

The people of Ile-aux-Coudres talk of their fading tradition of constructing boats to ride the seas....

From the lower St. Lawrence, a picture of whale hunting that looks more like a round-up, with a corral, whale-boys and all. In 1534, when he stopped at the island he named l'Île-aux-Coudres, Jacques Cartier saw how the Indians captured the little whi...

A virtual prisoner of the winter snows that block its roads, the village of St.Hilarion, to justify its name, revels in the joys of the jig and the "turlutte", the lilting songs that tell the humorous tale, ever new and yet essentially always the sam...

Not far from the North Pole on Ellesmere Island, for one hundred and twenty days, a watchful camera stalks a beast of fleece and hoof, the ancient musk-ox, in anticipation of the great bull's duel for dominance. By the light of late summer, in the hu...

Three communities at the foot of the Charlevoix cliffs, Petite-Rivière, île-aux-Coudres and Les Éboulements, practise the myriad trades of the sea. Its men are sailors, stevedores, longshoremen for the coasting trade. In winter, they becomes caulkers...

When Cartier wintered at Cap Rouge near Québec City in 1641, he claimed to have detected diamonds in the surrounding hills. Was he so very wrong? Three centuries later, 15,000 men have come to excavate the iron mountains of the Canadian tundra where ...

This documentary is about the Montagnais from Saint-Augustin et de La Romaine Indian reserve, in the region of the Côte-Nord in Quebec. Perrault approach those First Nations Citizens in order to discover that even if in our traditional occidental thi...

This early work from Pierre Perrault, made in collaboration with René Bonnière, chronicles summer activities in the Innu communities of Unamenshipu (La Romaine) and Pakuashipi. Shot by noted cinematographer Michel Thomas-d’Hoste, it documents the con...

Pierre Perrault takes Stéphane-Albert Boulais (from 'The Bright Beast', one of his films) to discover Saint-Malo and Jacques Cartier, in preparation for the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada (1534-1984). City tour with guide. Examination o...

Feature documentary on the agricultural Abitibi. This film is a real plea for the earth and for a more human kind of life in the face of a society that has become cold and insensitive....

After 'A kingdom awaits you' and 'The return to the earth', the filmmaker Pierre Perrault concludes, with this documentary feature, his plea for the Abitibi region. The film gives the floor to Hauris Lalancette, farmer, colorful character, who has be...

On the North Shore of the St. Lawrence, the Otis family hunts for white whales and seals with rusty old rifles in hand-crafted boats. This is the traditional method of the Basque whalers who frequented the coast in the 16th century....

This documentary produced for TV follows a project consisting in remaking the journey of discoveries in the footsteps of Cartier's book. Sailors, some from Saint-Malo, others from the river, were entrusted with the care of navigation....

...

...

Life in a north-shore village where everybody's name is Robertson and where everyone hunts for seal. In December the seals come in great herds from Greenland, and for two weeks in this peaceful village it's all hands to the lines....