Charles mort ou vif
Rock Demers has been a key figure in the history of cinema in Quebec since the 60s, for his involvement in the promotion, creation and production of films. A co-founder of the Cinémathèque québécoise, he is best known to the public as a producer on the series he initiated, the Contes pour tous. However, we wanted to show with this program the extent of his involvement in cinema that goes beyond Canadian borders, marked by his interest in auteur cinema (he bought the Canadian rights to Charles mort ou vif by Alain Tanner, immediately after its screening at Cannes), in animation (he wrote the screenplay for Faroun, the little clown, directed by Bretislav Pojar), with a predilection for directors from Central and Eastern Europe (Why Havel? by Vojtěch Jasný).
The slow disintegration of the social personality of a rich and respected industrialist from Geneva, who abandons his business, his family and his environment to try to find his truth.
Alain Tanner
Tanner found work at the British Film Institute in 1955, subtitling, translating, and organizing the archive. His first film, Nice Time (1957), a short documentary film about Piccadilly Circus during weekend evenings, was made with Claude Goretta. Between 1960 and 1968, Tanner returned to Switzerland, and he made more than 40 films as well as documentaries for French-language television there. In 1962, he became the co-founder of the Swiss young filmmakers' "Groupe Cinque." His first feature film, Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), won the first prize at the international film festival in Locarno. His next two films, La salamandre (1971) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), were made in close collaboration with the art critic and novelist John Berger, who had also worked with him, to a lesser degree and without a credit, on the writing of Charles.
Rock Demers
Amazed cinephile, great traveler, Rock Demers left its mark on Quebec’s cinema landscape in addition to children's cinema. Born in Sainte-Cécile-de-Lévrard, he studied pedagogy in Montreal, already showing an interest in knowledge transmission. He then turned to cinema and participated, in 1963, in the founding of the Cinémathèque québécoise along with Guy L. Côté. Shocked by his discovery of Eastern European filmmakers and his meeting with Bretislav Pojar, he worked in the distribution of children’s films by creating the Films Faroun distribution company in the mid-1960s, and a youth section at Montreal’s international film Festival. He then began a career as a producer with Le martien de Noël (Bernard Gosselin, 1971). In 1980, he founded Les Productions La Fête, which saw the birth of his most famous project: the Contes pour tous, a series of films that began with the huge success of La guerre des tuques (André Melançon, 1984). However, Demers does not limit himself to children's cinema, producing works such as Why Havel? (Vojtěch Jasný, 1991) and Le silence des fusils (Arthur Lamothe, 1996).
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