A retrospective of the work of Léa Pool, the fighter, at the Cinémathèque québécoise

It’s a great event. I’m proud of it, says Léa Pool, flattered. It’s just missing my documentaries, but it’s a huge retrospective.

She will attend almost all the screenings of her 13 feature films at the Cinémathèque québécoise, which is located in Montreal.

The public will thus be able to see or rediscover films such as Anne Trister (1986), Body lost (1988), Mom at the hairdresser (2008), but also the last escape (2010), with Yves Jacques, Jacques Godin and Andrée Lachapelle, Bring me (1999) with Karine Vanasse, Pascale Bussières and Nancy Huston, as well asAnd at worst, we’ll get married (2017), with Sophie Nélisse.

These are a bit all [mes] children, she says. There is no film that I am ashamed of having made.

His feature films are obviously based on the dialogues, but not only. They are very much based on emotion, poetry, the unsaid, looks and musicshe explains.

” Music has always been an important character in my films, not to emphasize [un passage]but to give another voice and bring the emotion to the right place. »

For Léa Pool, looking back on this work built up over the years also means looking back on her personal life as the two are intertwined. The cinema has really become a traveling companion. My life as a filmmaker has followed my personal life and my landmarks are linked to release dates or film shoots.

Every movie is a battle

At 71, Léa Pool has devoted more than 35 years of her life to cinema and has won numerous awards. However, she had to fight to get there. Every movie is a battle. You have to want to defend it, turn it and defend it again when it comes out, she explains. To have a career with a large number of films, you have to always want to say something and defend it afterwards.

” It takes a lot of willpower to make films, but it’s a necessity for me. I’ll only stop when I can’t anymore. »

This determination must have been all the stronger since Léa Pool has evolved all these years in an extremely masculine environment. For a very long time, I felt alone in my field. I remember going to festivals in Berlin, Venice and Sundance, and being the only woman in competition.

Now there are more women, and women winning awards, she adds. I’m super happy to know that we’re finally getting to the possibility of having as many female directors as male directors.

childhood wounds

Born in Switzerland in 1950, Léa Pool was placed by her parents in an orphanage for the first years of her life before returning to live with them. Why? She never got an answer.

” The absence of the mother and the void to be filled, these are recurring themes in my work and I think it comes from this first lack »

The director also considers that her work is marked by the fact that her father, a Jew and Pole, was stateless due to the war. She bears her mother’s surname.

It is therefore no coincidence that the filmmaker adopted her daughter, born in China and now 26 years old, whom she raised alone. We chose each othershe says.

Free yourself in Quebec

It was in the mid-1970s that Léa Pool left Switzerland to study in Quebec and become a director there. If I had stayed in Switzerland, would I have made a career in cinema? I am not sure.

When she arrived in Quebec, she felt she could reinvent herself there, as no one in the province knew her. It gives freedom. We can no longer believe in all that is possible than when we hang around [derrière soi] all his past, his family…

She regrets today this impression of total freedom, that of creating a film being animated not by the concern for the receipts which it will generate, but by the need to express itself. When you’re a young director, you’re allowed to have a kind of freedom. Afterwards, to build your work and live from your work, you have to be somewhat profitable.

To live from this profession, we still make concessions, she continues. We go before committees, we have to rewrite [des scénarios]we censor ourselves a bit.

Today, Léa Pool feels that she has conveyed most of what she has to say to the public. I no longer want to go towards the complicity of beings, solidarity she says.

Ongoing adaptation of an Icelandic novel

His next feature film is in this direction. This is an adaptation of the novel Goldwhich means scar in Icelandic, which was written by Icelandic Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

The story takes place in a country that has just gone through a war, without being located in a particular territory and evoking a specific war. It speaks of the reconstruction of this country, but also of an individual.

It is the suffering of a man who comes from Quebec and that of a people, and it is on how the two sufferings will help each other to rebuildsummarizes Léa Pool.

It talks about all the wars, those that have taken place and those that will come.

The director began working on this film, which aims to be hopeful, three years ago, before the war in Ukraine, which should influence the interpretation of actors and actresses, but also influence the making of the film.

Maybe this will change my representation of war and prevent me from being in the cliché.

The shooting of this fourteenth fiction film by Léa Pool should take place this fall and this winter in the south of France, near the Spanish border.

The retrospective program Léa Pool: moving figures can be viewed on the Cinémathèque québécoise website (New window).

This text was written froman interview broadcast on the show Penelope and an interview by Catherine Richer, cultural columnist on the show 15-18. Comments may have been edited for clarity or conciseness.