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- FOCUS-DOCU #1: The Autobiographical "I" - October 19, 2026 - 6 pm - 9 pm
- Meet the Film Factory residents (2025-2026) - December 8, 2026 - 6 pm - 9 pm
19
Oct
FOCUS-DOCU #1: The Autobiographical “I”
Meetup, Rencontre - Documentary Cinema - Fall 2026
Date / Heure
19 October 2026
6 pm - 9 pm
Lieu
Main Film Atelier
2025 Rue Parthenais #304-A, Montréal, Quebec, H2K 3T2
Guests | Claude Demers, Adrian Wills, Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins
Free upon registration
I, YOU, HE/SHE: This edition of FOCUS-DOCU offers a reflection on the various approaches documentary cinema takes toward reality. Through three panel discussions, the series explores the multifaceted relationships that develop between the filmmaker, the viewer, and the subject. Spanning personal involvement, audience engagement, and observation of the world, these roundtables examine the formal, ethical, and political choices that shape contemporary documentary practices.
The autobiographical documentary blurs the lines between the filmmaker, the subject, and the film. Whether it is a self-documentary or a story centered on a loved one, the filmmaker is intimately connected to the story being told and makes their own presence a central element of the film. The camera becomes a tool for personal exploration, memory, transmission, or healing. How does the filmmaker’s presence within the narrative itself change things? How can one film one’s own intimacy or that of loved ones without losing the distance necessary for creation?
For more information, please feel free to send an email to: services@mainfilm.qc.ca
Paul-Claude Demers is a self-taught filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. After his first feature-length fiction film, *L’invention de l’amour* (2000), which was selected for several festivals in Canada and abroad, he turned to documentary filmmaking with *Barbiers – Une histoire d’hommes* (2006), which won a Gémeaux Award. He followed that with *Les dames en bleu* (2009), which screened at numerous international festivals and won a Gémeaux Award for Best Documentary Screenplay, and then *D’où je viens* (2014), which screened notably at Rotterdam and Hot Docs. In 2016, his short fiction film *Mon dernier été* won 17 awards.
In 2019, Demers directed *Une femme, ma mère*, which won the Grand Prix in the national feature film competition at the RIDM, before going on to achieve significant critical and popular success and receiving, among other honors, a Gémeaux Award and an Écran Award. His documentary essay *Journal d’un père* is set to be released in 2023. Poetic and deeply human, his films have been screened and honored at numerous international festivals. He continues to create both documentary and fiction films, while also working as a scriptwriting and directing consultant and as a mentor in documentary filmmaking at INIS.
D’où je viens (2014) : In this feature-length documentary, filmmaker Claude Demers returns to the working-class neighborhood where he grew up to explore the mystery of his origins. In this intimate chronicle, his journey intertwines with that of two young boys just beginning to discover the world. The city of Verdun and the St. Lawrence River provide the backdrop for this coming-of-age story and introspective journey. Blending realism with lyricism, this film is a free-spirited work that is as human as it is poetic.
Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins
Born in Quebec City, Olivier Higgins and Mélanie Carrier—both biologists by training—discovered filmmaking while documenting their many journeys around the world. In 2006, they directed the film *Asiemut*, which chronicles their 8,000-kilometer bike ride from Mongolia to India. The film, which has won numerous awards, has been screened in some 40 countries. In 2010, the director-producer couple founded MÖ FILMS, an independent production company dedicated to documentary filmmaking. Their second film, *Rencontre* (2011), selected by the National Geographic Society, won several international awards, while their satirical short film with an environmental theme, *L’Homme de glace*, was screened at numerous festivals. Their documentary *Québékoisie*, which explores the relationship between Quebecers and First Nations peoples, was nominated for a Jutra Award in 2014 and won awards at the RIDM and RIFF, among others. In 2020, Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins released *Errance sans retour*, a feature-length documentary addressing the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh.
Québékoisie (2013) : To better understand the complex relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, Mélanie and Olivier decided to cycle along the Côte-Nord, little knowing that their quest for identity would take them on a journey that would swing them back and forth between themselves and the ends of the earth. From chance encounters to planned meetings, their journey will take them on a surprising path that crosses that of an Innu man searching for his ancestors in Normandy and the deeply moving story of Corporal Lemay’s sister, whose brother was killed during the Oka Crisis in 1990.
Adrian Wills is a creator and director with over 20 years of experience who excels in fiction, documentary, and multi-camera work. His portfolio has earned numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Film. He has collaborated with clients such as The Beatles, the Michael Jackson estate, NASA, and the Leonard Cohen estate. Among his notable achievements are co-creating the drama series 21 THUNDER, an original CBC and Netflix production, as well as co-directing the series and directing DEADLY SECRETS / SECRETS MORTELS, a crime series for Investigation Discovery USA. He is adapting Wayne Johnston’s award-winning novel, *Jennie’s Boy*, with Telefilm Canada and Picture NL (Newfoundland), for a feature film that he is set to direct.
A Quiet Girl (2023) : In A Quiet Girl, adopted Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills discovers, on camera and in real time, the startling truths of his complex beginnings in Newfoundland. Shocking details drive Wills to the core of his birth mother’s resilience, and ultimately his own. In this moving feature documentary that combines 16mm footage and contemporary images with deeply personal conversations, Wills’ voyage transforms from an urgent search for identity into a quest to give a quiet girl her voice.
8
Dec
Meet the Film Factory residents (2025-2026)
Meetup, Rencontre - Documentary Cinema - Fall 2026
Date / Heure
8 December 2026
6 pm - 9 pm
Lieu
Main Film Atelier
2025 Rue Parthenais #304-A, Montréal, Quebec, H2K 3T2
Guests | B Brookbank (Good Smoke on Skin), Raphaëlle Bergeron (La théorie des fluides) et Alina Herta (Ailleurs)
Free upon registration
Come and meet the three artists selected for the 2025-2026 Film Factory, supported by Main Film as part of a one-year residency dedicated to research or production in experimental cinema. From submitting their applications to screening their works at various festivals, through their phases of creative exploration, they will share the major milestones of their journey as well as the concrete benefits of this residency.
This is an excellent opportunity for those considering submitting a project to the next edition of the Manufacture de Films!
This exchange will provide a better understanding of how the program works, but also open up a space for dialogue around the projects in progress, the experiences, the challenges, the highlights, and the experimentation processes specific to each resident.
Deadline for the next application: January 23rd, 2027
For more information, please send an email to: services@mainfilm.qc.ca
B. Brookbank
B. Brookbank is an artist from Nova Scotia, Canada, currently working in Montréal. Their practice considers the language and poetics of photography, through an interdisciplinary approach that includes moving image, installation, sculpture and writing. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and Centre Clark (Montréal), Écart (Rouyn-Noranda), and the Anna (Halifax). Select group exhibitions took place at Patel Brown, (Montréal and Toronto), Centre Clark (Montréal), and Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax). Their practice has been supported through various grants and awards such as Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Fellowship, Roloff Beny Photography Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Brookbank holds an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BFA in Photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.
Residency project – Good Smoke on Skin
With Main Film I will be working on an experimental video project titled Good Smoke on Skin. It will depict poetic vignettes of desire and intimacy, through portraits, still lives, tension, and eroticism. By evading typical depictions of eroticism, searching gestures of intimacy in the home will aim to understand the limits of the erotic, giving license to space, animals, or objects to act as metaphorical links to desire. In some scenes the body will be present, layering itself with the symbolism within the film while building a gestural and experimental narrative. These vignettes will examine the physical and metaphorical aspects of desire – what resides within the body and what falls away.
Raphaëlle Bergeron
Raphaëlle Bergeron is a young filmmaker based in Montreal. After obtaining a certificate in feminist studies, in 2024 she completed a bachelor’s degree in cinema at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she gained experience in documentary directing, art direction and production. Her work explores themes such as filiation, memory and mental health.
Residency project – La théorie des fluides
Inspired by true events, La théorie des fluides is an experimental short film following the story of a patient who develops a phobia of water following a heart transplant.As the story unfolds, painted and engraved analog images reveal the sudden death of the transplanted heart.
Alina Herţa
Alina Herţa (b. 1996, Hațeg) is (among other things) a visual artist whose practice navigates between photography, print and moving image. Trained in graphic design at UQÀM (2018), she is gradually orienting her work towards freer forms as she collaborates with Montreal’s independent scene. Inspired by alternative approaches to the image, Alina favors analog mediums and their accidental potential. She approaches the camera as both a tool for observation and a means of entering into dialogue with the unknown. In 2023, she made her first two short films, which have since been shown at various independent events in Culiacán (Auditorio Deutsche Bank, Jardín Botánico), Guadalajara (Taller Sociedad), Montevideo (Laboratorio FAC), and at festivals in Zurich (Videoex) and Montreal (Pop Montréal).
Residency project – Ailleurs
Ailleurs is an experimental short film project that explores how memory, belonging and displacement shape our relationship to inhabited spaces. Inspired by the floating homes of Newfoundland’s Resettlement Program – an initiative from the 1960s-1970s in which some families, rather than abandon their homes, chose to relocate them by sea – the project conjures up the image of an uprooted house, floating between here and elsewhere. From this image springs the desire to capture the home not as a mere physical place, but as a space constructed by memory, loss and desire. Through a collection of archives, stories and images of abandoned houses shot on Newfoundland territory in 16 mm, Elsewhere questions what remains of the home after leaving it.