Paule Baillargeon - Compagne des arts et des lettres du Québec

Born in Val-d’Or at the beginning of the Quiet Revolution, actress, director, screenwriter, and author Paule Baillargeon became a feminist by necessity, a documentarist by accident, and a dissenter by compassion.

After cofounding the Grand Cirque Ordinaire to explore and support collective creation and improvisation, she took up the camera. Both rebellious and discreet, her impactful, controversial work has left its mark and is often received as electric shocks. From La cuisine rouge to Le sexe des étoiles (The Sex of the Stars), she holds up a faithful mirror to an unbearable reality.

Powerful and poignant, her films navigate between fiction and indictment to expose the social rift between the sexes, denouncing the banal nature of violence and injustice, rebelling against suffocating traditions, and showing the abyss of solitude and aging.

An instrument of her rebellion and evidence of her activism, film led this woman without a gun – this Fille sans fusil – to speak out to create “what doesn’t yet exist” and that she continues to desire. The Prix Albert-Tessier and a Jutra-Hommage have capped off her career.

About the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec

The Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec This link will open in a new window is a distinction of the Council which aims to honor people who have made a remarkable contribution, through their commitment and dedication, to the development, promotion or influence of the arts and letters of Quebec. .

The Council would like to thank its partners, the Caisse de la Culture and the newspaper Le Devoir.

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