Honorary members

Thérèse Bérubé was a member of the very first team at Vidéographe, where she took care of member and user relations. She went on to train for two years with Monique Champagne, a well-known script supervisor in Montréal. Over a career that has spanned more than 40 years, Bérubé has played an important role in Quebec cinema, working as a script supervisor on close to 145 productions, the majority of which are feature-length films. She has worked on many major films in Quebec cinema, alongside a great many renowned filmmakers, including Louis Bélanger, Gilles Carle, Anne Émond, Bernard Émond, Philippe Falardeau, André Fortier, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Micheline Lanctôt, Carole Laure, Simon Lavoie, Catherine Martin, Louis Saia and Denis Villeneuve.

After starting his career in documentaries, Charles Binamé moved into advertising. Today, directing feature films and television series takes up most of his time. He directed his first film, Un autre homme, in 1991 and followed it with the series Blanche. Next came C’était le 12 du 12, Chili avait les blues and Eldorado. After another series, Marguerite Volant, he directed the films Le Coeur au poing (Streetheart) and La beauté de Pandore (Pandora’s Beauty). 2001 marked his return to documentary with Gauvreau (2005 Jutra winner for Best Documentary). Un homme et son péché set a new box-office record en 2002. He then directed Maurice Richard (winner of nine Genies in 2007, including Best Achievement in Direction). The film was a hit with critics and public alike and was selected for the Tokyo Festival. In 2006, he received the Jutra Award for Best Documentary for Gilles Carles ou l’indomptable imaginaire. Le piège américain, his latest feature, staring Rémy Girard in the role of the well known criminal Lucien Rivard, will be released in May 2008. He has directed English-language projects such as Hunt for Justice (winner of the 2006 Gemini for Best Movie), and the mini-series H20 and Trojan Horse. Charles Binamé’s many award-winning films and miniseries have been featured in prestigious international festivals.

2014 saw the release of the thriller Elephant Song, Charles Binamé’s most recent feature-length film. He has won numerous awards for his films and series, which have been presented in prestigious international festivals. In May 2019, we will be able to see his stage production of Carmen at the Opéra de Montréal.

Binamé was the first to use the equipment at Vidéographe in 1971. He made Réaction 26, an experimental video that combines feedback and live action in a montage that might call to mind a surrealist ballet, and Bobo-Z-Arts, a series of interviews with artists about the art scene at a time when a number of new professional artists’ associations were emerging.

AWARDS AND DINSTINCTIONS

2015 – Price of the Guilde canadienne des réalisateurs, Best direction and et Écrans Canadiens Price, Best adaptation for The Elephant Song

2007 – Best film and Grand Jury Price at the Krasnogorski International Sport Film Festival (Russie), for Maurice Richard

2007 – Génie, 9 prices including Best Direction for Maurice Richard

2007 – Special Jury Price “Best Film” and Public Price at the Palm Beach International Film Festival for Maurice Richard

2007 – Best Canadian film from the Vancouver Film Critics Circle for Maurice Richard

2006 – Jutra, Best film and Best direction for Maurice Richard

2006 – Totem d’or Hommage at the Festival du Film de l’Outaouais for Maurice Richard

2006 – Gémeaux, Best film and Best direction for Gilles Carle ou l’indomptable imaginaire

2006 – Jutra, Best documentary for Gilles Carles ou l’indomptable imaginaire

2006 – Gemini, Best movie film for Hunt for Justice (Combat pour la justice)

2006 – FIPA d’or for the best actress for Hunt for Justice

2006 – Overall Favorite and Favorite at the San Francisco Orinda Film Festival for Hunt for Justice

2005 – Outstanding Team Achievement In A Television Movie or Mini Series at the Director’s Guild of Canada Awards for H20

2003 – 6 Jutra including Best Actor, Best actress and Billet d’Or for Séraphin, un homme et son péché

2003 – Génie, Bobine d’Or for Séraphin, un homme et son péché

2003 – Gémeaux, Best direction : Documentary, Biographies for Gauvreau ou l’obligation de la liberté

1998 – Crystal Globe, Best film and Best direction at the Karlovy Vary International Festival for Le cœur au poing

1998 – Best Canadian Screenplay Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival for Le cœur au poing

1996 – FIPA d’argent, Best drama serie at the Biarritz Festival International de programmes Audiovisuels for Marguerite Volant

1996 – Gémeaux, 4 prices including Best direction for Marguerite Volant

1996 – Special mention of the Cannes Quinzaine des Réalisateurs for Eldorado

1996 – Special mention from the CICAE (Confédération internationale des cinémas d’art et d’essai européens) for Eldorado

1996 – Prix Jacques-Bouchard, Best direction work of the year in advertising

1994 – FIPA d’or, Best drama serie at the Biarritz Festival international de programmes Audiovisuels for Blanche

1994 – Gold Medal for Best Drama Series International Film and Video Festival (NYC) for Blanche

1994 – Gémeaux, 7 prices including Best direction: drama serie for Blanche

A Quebec pioneer of experimental video and inventor of the ‘boyétizeur anamorphique’ (1974), Jean-Pierre Boyer has been a professor in the communications department and later the École des médias at l’UQÀM since 1986, where he teaches critical theory in the field of communications and socio-pol-ethical approaches to alternative and experimental media. As a researcher and co-founder of the Centre de recherche en imagerie populaire (CRIP-UQÀM), he is also interested in iconographic and discursive production within social movements in Quebec and around the world. He has published three essays on the political philosophy and ‘pamphlet writings’ of Thomas Paine (1995 and 1998) and Pierre du Calvet (2002), and contributed to the anthology Pour changer le monde – Affiches des mouvements sociaux au Québec de 1966 à 2007 (2008). As an artist-citizen, he has produced several experimental video works and documentaries (1972-2002), has been involved in defending political prisoners and civil liberties in Quebec, and has created an interactive ‘shamanic’ video sculpture entitled Totem d’humanité (2002). In the autumn of 2013, a retrospective of his works was held at the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Jean-Pierre Boyer has also written and contributed to a number of publications. His most recent work, C’est pas parce qu’ils sont nombreux à avoir tort qu’ils ont raison ! : 12 923 citations pour aiguiser l’esprit critique will be launched on the 30 October 2018 at the bookshop Port de tête.

Boyer, who has used the equipment at Vidéographe to edit several of his works, sat on its Board of Directors at the end of the 1990s.

Over the course of the 1970s, Michel Cartier worked in television as a director and choreographer. He was director of the Feux-follets: Canada’s National Folk Ensemble, during which time he choreographed the Man and his World ceremony in 1967 as well as the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montréal.

Cartier taught television and multimedia in the Communications Department at UQAM from 1975 to 1997. During the 1980s, he was a computing pioneer, vice president of the Apple Education Foundation and director of the telematics laboratory at UQAM. He was involved in the establishment of the Platon, Télidon and Internet networks and has explored distance learning, e-government, electronic publishing and the creation of a new writing medium.

In 1990, Cartier founded the RVTI (Réseau de veille sur les technologies d’information), which has now become ConstellationW. He is also a consultant to various institutions and governments around the world about new information and communication technologies and their impacts on language and culture.

Cartier has published a great many books and articles and has received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the Medal of the National Assembly of Quebec.

Michel Cartier was a member of Vidéographe’s first Board of Directors and is a signatory of the 1973 letters patent.

AWARDS AND DINSTINCTIONS
. Medal of the National Assembly of the Government of Quebec
. Louis-Philippe-Beaudoin Prize (Institute of Graphic Arts)
. Commonwealth Medal (Commonwealth Games)
. Medal of the Government of Mexico (choreography – 1976 Montreal Olympics)
. Medal of La Francophonie – ACCT (Niamey Summit)
. Boomerang-Tribute Award (Quebec Multimedia Industry)
. Quebec Digital Industry Tribute Award (Webcom)

Vidéographe opened its doors in 1971 in what had been a fur shop and warehouse on St Denis Street, across from the offices of Mainmise, a magazine that epitomized 1970s counter culture in Quebec.

Pierre Devroede worked at Vidéographe from its beginnings in 1971. He played a part in the conception of video theatre and oversaw ‘videogramme’ viewings, which sometimes led to discussions in the video theatre. He also oversaw the distribution of videogrammes to community television, community groups and educational institutions.

He remained in contact with community television companies, collaborating with them on Sélecto-TV, an interactive television experience. Called Sélectovision, this new initiative allowed cable subscribers to select titles from Vidéographe’s collection to watch on their televisions.

Because Vidéographe was a pioneering force in the democratization of the means of production and dissemination of video, its staff were often required to give information or training sessions to community groups and educational institutions, in Quebec and abroad. We must remember that in the 1970s audio-visual centres in CÉGEP were growing rapidly and few teachers knew what to do with the new technologies.

Pierre Devroede’s career in television at Radio-Canada spanned more than 30 years. He worked as a journalist and director of shows such as Ce Soir, Le Point, Zone Libre, Découverte and La facture. Here are some examples of his work:

. On the show Ce Soir, he covered the regional and national news.

. He produced a number of reports about different indigenous communities in Quebec and Canada’s North.

. In 1985, he was at the border between North and South Korea during the first reconciliations between families separated by the war.

. He covered reports in several African countries on a range of subjects, including Noma, a disfiguring disease that affected children in Niger. Swiss doctors performed operations on them so that they would not be rejected by their communities.

. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he made a documentary report with Jean-Michel Leprince about the miserable living conditions of miners of coltan, a metal used in the production of cell phones.

. In Latin America, he covered the Earth Summit (1992) with Michaëlle Jean, the first international summit on climate change which took place in Rio, Brazil.

. Together with Jean-Michel Leprince and Francine Bastien, he covered the Zapatista army uprising and the indigenous revolution in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico.

. Also in Mexico, with Jean-Michel Leprince, he covered the struggle against corruption in a country in which the authorities are often part of the problem.

AWARDS AND MENTIONS

1991 – Prix Judith Jasmin for a series of three reports on domestic violence, Drames Familiaux, broadcast on the show Le Point.

2007 – New York Festivals, World Medal in the Health/Medical Information category for his reportage on the show Découverte about a medical miracle, Vioxx, which made the fortune of the multinational pharmaceutical company Merck and which was pulled from the market after it was proven to cause serious cardio-vascular problems. (‘The Rise and Fall of a Miracle Drug’)

An audacious filmmaker and screenwriter, Pierre Falardeau (1946-2009) has quickly become one of the most visible directors in the Quebecois and Canadian film scene. His raw and incisive style has been known to leave no one indifferent and has often fed hostile controversies. His frankness, his positions on political and social issues and his stance against federalism and the colonialist exploitation of workers have certainly made him a most colourful intellectual. Yet despite his sarcasm and his casual air, Falardeau remains a sincere crusader. Faced with jeering reprisals from closed doors and the systematic refusal by government film assistance programs, his work is synonymous with perserverance, provocation and denunciation.

Born in 1938, Robert Forget studied biology and physiology. He made educational films on 8mm in the 1960s, through which he met Norman McLaren. He began working at the National Film Board (NFB) in 1965 as Director of the Department of Educational Films on Biology. He participated in the Groupe de recherches sociales, with, among others, Maurice Bulbulian, Fernand Dansereau and Michel Régnier, where the idea of interactive cinema was developed. This led to his interest in video at the turn of the 1970s. He initiated the Vidéographe project, which came into being in 1971. He was the director and one of the first animators during these early years, along with Jean-Pierre Masse and Jean-Jacques Leduc. In 1973 he received the John-Grierson Award for his exceptional contribution to Canadian cinema.

Returning to the NFB, he became Director of the French Animation Studio (1978) where he once again showed his visionary talent by initiating the Centre d’animatique dedicated to the research and development of computer-assisted animation filmmaking. He then became the Director of the French program (1989), and later Director of Technical Services (1993). Over the course of his career, he has produced more than 80 films including With Drums and Trumpets (1968) by Marcel Carrière, Little Burgundy (1969) by Maurice Bulbulian,  Wow (1969) by Claude Jutra  and Rectangle & Rectangles (1984) by René Jodoin.

He was instrumental in launching the CinéRobothèque, a center that provided free access to the NFB collection, which was open from 1992 to 2012. He retired in 1998 and in 2012 was recognized as a Canadian Digital Media Pioneer.

A doctor of philosophy, Jean-Paul Lafrance founded and headed up the communications department at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) as well as the research group “Homo Ludens,” which examines sociability in online video games. He was also Director of the UNESCO-BELL Chair in Communication and International Development and a guest professor at the Université d’Avignon, the Université Paris VII, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Lafrance is a research associate at the Centre national des télécommunications de France (CNET) and a consultant for the CCETT (Rennes), FR2-FR3, and DATAR. He has also been a consultant for several ministries and research centres in Canada and Europe.

Lafrance is a member of the editorial team at the French journal Hermès and has written numerous books about the media, and particularly the Internet and video games. Among his books is Promesses et mirages de la civilisation numérique which was published in January 2018. His latest book, Malaise dans la civilisation numérique, is due to be published in early 2019.

Jean-Paul Lafrance was very active at Vidéographe in encouraging students at UQAM to use the Centre’s services. He also convinced the police authorities that the Centre was not a communist meeting place, thus avoiding its enforced closure by the state. He was a member of Vidéographe’s first Board of Directors and a signatory of its letters patent.

Yves Langlois has worked as a filmmaker, scriptwriter and editor for more than 30 years. A communications expert and psychosociologist, he has a master’s degree in communication and Psycho-sociology and a bachelor’s degree in cultural information. He has always privileged documents which raise awareness. In particular, he has distinguished himself by his films and articles on native peoples, immigrants, Third World nations and marginalized communities in general. In 2008, he received the award for the best socially-engaged film in the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival for his film The Last Flight. In 2005, he received the Judith Jasmin award for the year’s best portrait for his film L’envol du monarque, awarded by the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec.

In addition to numerous articles in newspapers, reviews and magazines, Yves Langlois has written two books and collaborated on three others.

While he was still a student, Langlois collaborated on the series Québec ké cé ça ? with Vidéographe. He then became president and director of Vidéographe, where he contributed to the running of the Centre’s activities, the honing of its operational procedures and the growth of its membership. The definitions of membership that Vidéographe uses today were established by Langlois.

AWARDS AND DINSTINCTIONS
2005 – Judith-Jasmin Prize for best portrait of the year, awarded by the Quebec Federation of Professional Journalists, for
L’envol du monarque.
2008 – Quebec Award for Best Documentary Awarded to the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival for L’envol du monarque.

Jean-Jacques Leduc is known for his work at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He has produced some 25 animated films, including the well-known series Ludovic by Co Hoedeman. He has also made two animated films. In 1981, he collaborated on Zea with his brother André, who is also an animation specialist. The film won the Cannes Festival Special Jury Prize in 1981 and the Genie Award for Best Theatrical Short in Toronto in 1982. In 1990, he made Mirrors of Time, which brought together animation filmmakers who took the opportunity to use the software developed by the Centre d’animatique.

Leduc was involved in setting up the CinéRobothèque, and then developed DVDcopie, an automatized platform that allowed on-demand access to thousands of titles from the NFB collection on DVD.

A close collaborator with Robert Forget, he is a founding member of Sonographe, the equivalent of Vidéographe for the support and dissemination of sound creation. The Sonographe collection is now kept at the laboratory La création sonore at the Université de Montréal.

À venir

Jean-Pierre Masse has made some 15 films, the majority of which are socially engaged documentaries, including the first documentary about the FLQ, two works about Haiti, and the important documentaries, La nuit de la poésie of 1970, 1980 and 1991, which were co-directed with Jean-Claude Labrecque. He taught filmmaking at UQAM from 1976 to 2008 and trained a great number of filmmakers in Quebec. Masse was one of the creators and a judge of the “Destination Monde” races for several years. Over the course of his career, he has also worked as an editor, assistant director and performer on numerous artistic and educational productions.

Jean-Pierre Masse has made a considerable contribution to Vidéographe since the beginning, training and supporting artists and other individuals to use the equipment at the Centre. He has therefore participated in many productions through helping visitors to the Centre to understand the language of video and editing.

An important figure in the occupation of he École des Beaux-arts in 1968, Pierre Monat switched from painting to graphic design following the disappointment around the founding of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He began in a sense at the Quartier latin magazine and ended up at the National Film Board (NFB), where he worked on the graphic design of the journal Médium média for the Société nouvelle/Challenge for Change program. Between 1968 and 1976 he temporarily left the “ink pit” to build a reputation as a “good graphic designer”. During this period, Monat dabbled a little in video.

At Vidéographe, Pierre Monat made two fascinating documents in terms of both form and content, namely Vive les animaux, a meeting between Edgar Morin and a group of Quebecois intellectuals, and Y’a du dehors dedans about the ensemble Quatuor de Jazz Libre du Québec. Two other projects did not work out and he subsequently abandoned video, which for him was merely one ‘tool’ among many. At the end of the 1970s, he returned to painting, which he still practices.

From 1973 to 1975, Rashed Tahani directed videos for SUCO and Carrefour international. In 1976, she worked with M. Duckworth on a short film, Les mesures de contrôle et une nouvelle société. She then directed  Leur crise on la paye pas (1976), a documentary for the common front syndicate and Les frères ennemis (1979) for Radio-Canada. Her first feature film, Les voleurs de job was created in 1980. She worked for Planète, a television programme broadcast on Radio-Québec, where she directed six films in 1980 and 1981. Rashed Tahani began working at the National Film Board of Canada in 1980.

Tahani Rached worked at the National Film Board from 1981 to 2004 before returning to her native country, Egypt, in 2006. Throughout her career, she has made documentaries in Quebec, Beirut, Haiti, Palestine and Egypt. Her films are deeply socio-politically engaged and principally address Palestinian and Haitian causes, workers’ and womens’ issues, and political climates. She has received a number of awards and These Girls has been selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
1994 – OCS Cinema Award from the Office of Social Communications for
Doctors with Heart (Médecins du cœur)
2004 – Special mention at the festival Cinematographic Days of Carthage (Tunisia) for Soraida, a Woman of Palestine
2006 – Special Jury Prize at the Journées Cinématographiques Festival of Carthage (Tunisia) for These Girls (Ces filles-là)
2006 – Ulysse Prize at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival (France) for
These Girls (Ces filles-là)