National Film Board Honors Filmmaker Gilles Blais

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) wishes to honour the memory and contribution to Quebec cinema of filmmaker Gilles Blais, who passed away on October 17 at the age of 84. Mr. Blais had a distinguished career spanning more than 30 years at the NFB.

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"Through his films, Gilles Blais was a true observer of society, not just in Quebec, but also in Canada and around the world. He will be remembered as a thoughtful filmmaker who was deeply attentive to his subjects and known and appreciated for his great respect and patience. These qualities made him a remarkable director." - Suzanne Guèvremont, Government Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the NFB

Quick Facts

• Born in 1941 in Rimouski, Gilles Blais joined the NFB in 1965.

• He worked with Doug Bradley, who was assistant cameraman on the flagship project In the Labyrinth by Roman Kroitor, Colin Low and Hugh O'Connor, created for Expo 67 in Montreal.

• He then worked as assistant cameraman on the documentary Beluga Days (1968) by Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and Bernard Gosselin, about the Île-aux-Coudres beluga fishers.

• That same year, he worked as assistant director on Straight to the Heart by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, a fiction feature with Robert Charlebois and Mouffe. He held the same role the following year on Vertige, an experimental film by Jean Beaudin.

• He then directed his first documentaries, taking the stance of an observer and minimizing his interventions with his protagonists. In the environmentally themed short "Water, Water Everywhere" (1971), he filmed the death throes of a trout in polluted water. The Netsilik Eskimo Today (1971) chronicles the day-to-day of an Inuit family in Pelly Bay (today Kugaaruk, Nunavut).

• From 1971 to 1974, he established a video unit for an agricultural outreach project in Tunisia.

• From 1977 to 1978, he served as production advisor for eight films on human settlements shot in Africa for the United Nations Conference.

• In parallel, he made two commissioned films: The Port of Montreal (1975) and Soils of Canada (1978).

• With Quebec nationalism in full swing, he resumed his observational role, giving voice to English Quebecers in Sophie Wollock's Newspaper (1979).

• He then made the documentary The Followers (1981), about young Quebec devotees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, portraying a youth in search of a new spirituality.

• In Les illusions tranquilles (1984), he returned to his home region to create a personal cinematic essay in the form of a pessimistic journal on the aftermath of the 1980 referendum.

• He briefly turned to fiction, directing The Old Woman (1986), an episode of the series Discussions in Bioethics, with Mimi d'Estée in the lead role.

• Returning to documentary, he then made three films:
  • Joseph K. L'homme numéroté (1990), a docufiction on surveillance and private life starring actor Paul Savoie-a prescient film that was ahead of its time.
  • The Engagement (1994), about a troupe of intellectually challenged performers who travel to France to stage a theatre production. Considered his most important work, the film won the Hydro-Québec Public's Grand Prize at the Festival du cinéma international en Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Best Social Issue Documentary at Hot Docs in Toronto.
  • Le grand silence (1997), on the 1995 referendum, a film that revisits the political reflections Blais had begun with Les illusions tranquilles 13 years earlier.

• He left the NFB in 1997.

• In 2005, working in the private sector, he directed Conventum, a documentary celebrating 50 years of the Quiet Revolution.

• Three films by Gilles Blais are available in English on nfb.ca.