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Emporte-moi
Location
Main screening room
Date
May 24th, 2022
Duration
95 min
Cycle
Léa Pool: Moving Figures

Filmmaker Léa Pool has been creating unique work in Quebec cinematography for several decades. In addition to asking genre questions since her first films, she asserted since her beginnings a sharp, precise look at the paths of individuals at the crossroads, carried by subjective, existential quests, nourished by an exemplary narrative breath and a mastery of the image.

In presence of the director

Set Me Free
Directed by
Léa Pool
Language
French with English subtitles
Actors
Karine Vanasse, Pascale Bussières, Nancy Huston
Origins
Québec, France, Switzerland
Year
1999
Duration
95 min
Genre
Drama
Format
35 mm
Synopsis

Léa Pool's first autobiographical film. Hanna is 13 years old and 1963 is the year when everything is decided. Between a stateless Jewish father, a Catholic mother, an accomplice older brother and her teacher with a disturbing resemblance to Anna Karina (Nancy Huston), Hanna awakens to the world and tries to become a young woman responsible for her own life.

Set Me Free
Awards

Léa Pool

Léa Pool was born and raised in Switzerland, before emigrating to Quebec in 1975 at the age of 25. After studying communication, she taught cinema and video at UQAM, while producing TV programs and her first films. Esteemed by the public and the critics alike, the works she produced in the 80’s (Strass Café, La femme de l'hôtel, Anne Trister, À corps perdu), stood out at international festivals and already bear witness to the filmmaker's favorite themes: quests for individual meaning, feminine trajectories, intimate relationships... Her fiction work of the 90’s cemented her place in Quebec cinematography while she started to veer towards documentary cinema. Over the past two decades, Léa Pool has produced several international co-productions, as well as her greatest public success: La passion d’Augustine (2015). Her work has been regularly honored around the world, earning her prestigious distinctions.

Photo : Monic Richard

Explore

I lived the same number of years in Quebec as in Europe, and my view of my childhood is colored by what I learned from Quebec. A creation is an encounter between what you are and what you have been. The more I advanced, the more I found that filming in Quebec created the right distance. By transposing this childhood to another place, with actors who speak differently than my family, it made it fictional, and it was no longer me, but the life of these characters. They had their own life.
Léa Pool, 1999
Full cast
About Léa Pool
Filmography | Director
Filmography | Writer

Léa Pool: the one who reivented herself as a filmmaker

Few women were directors in Quebec when Léa Pool made her debut. She says that she has never made this femininity a driving force or seen it as a brake, but she has patiently built a body of work paying homage to women through complex mother-daughter relationships. Meeting with the one whose painful childhood ended up being scarred by the cinema.

Léa Pool: 3 true stories (French)
DAMES DES VUES: a Léa Pool Portrait (French)
This filmmaker is a member of
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