La femme de l'hôtel
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 the presence of the director
A well-known director who returns to her home town of Montreal to film a high-budget musical drama. At her hotel, she has a brief but unsettling encounter with Estelle a suicidal elderly woman named. This is briefly forgotten until later when she meets the old lady again and with mounting incredulity Andrea discovers that the actual events in the woman's life mirror the fictional events in the director's film.
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 **
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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.
