The Cinémathèque québécoise was founded in 1963 by a passionate group of filmmakers. Today, it is a major institution whose mission is to acquire, document and safeguard Quebec’s cinema, television and audio-visual heritage, as well as that of international animation. It also collects significant works of Canadian and world cinema for screenings focused on culture and education.

The body of work has thus far largely sparked the interest of filmmakers in the representation of places and, more broadly, of territory and the environment, particularly within a community of Canadian filmmakers of European descent. The industrial and natural representations of the late 20th century also provide an opportunity to comment on territorial transformations that immediately raise ecological questions. Finally, it is worth noting that the representation of movement itself, both physical and mechanical, can lead to formal explorations that trace the origins of experimental cinema back to the explorations of early cinema.

Guillaume Lafleur

Guillaume Lafleur is the director of programming, distribution and publications at the Cinémathèque québécoise since 2017. He has supervised several reuse film works. Since 1999, he has published about a hundred articles and essays on contemporary cinema, Québec film history, experimental cinema, and film aesthetics. In 2015 he published, for Varia, Pratiques minoritaires, fragments d’une histoire méconnue du cinéma québécois (1937-1973), and then co-curated, together with Ralph Elawani, in 2020, the opera XPQ, traversée du cinéma expérimental québécois. (Somme toute/Cinémathèque québécoise). His most recent book is. Va voir ailleurs, essays on new century cinemas (Somme toute, 2024). He has been a programmer in North American and European festivals and institutions (New York, Winnipeg, Vienna, Toulouse, Barcelona, Rome, Bologna, London).