Maman est chez le coiffeur
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
Maman est chez le coiffeur tells the story of a young girl, Élise, played by rising star Marianne Fortier, who must learn to live with her mother's sudden departure for London. It's also the story of her relationship with a father overwhelmed by events, a somewhat imposing grandmother and her two little brothers, one obsessed with turning a lawnmower into a supertaller and the other, disturbed, locked up more and more often in the furnace room. And to help her overcome her grief "which forces her to hold back her heart so that it doesn't go through her striped shirt and crash on the cracked asphalt", the young girl will find comfort in Mr. Mouche, a deaf-mute.
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.
