vidéo-club : Spotlight on Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin
Spotlight on Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin is a program dedicated to the collaborative work of two great Quebec artists, Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin. As a tribute to Julien Poulin, it aims to highlight his contribution behind the camera in the politically engaged cinema he made alongside Pierre Falardeau, as a vital partner in the creation of an uncompromising body of work.
Mathieu Li-Goyette is a film critic, programmer, and comic-book researcher with a PhD in comparative literature from the Université de Montréal. Editor-in-chief of Panorama-cinéma magazine, he has edited collective works on cinema and organised numerous film events and retrospectives in Montreal and Paris, and was guest programmer at the Berlin Critics' Week in 2018. He recently became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and co-founded the Montréal Critics' Week, which held its first edition in January 2025.
List of works in program
A program to watch with your head, sti!
As a tribute to Julien Poulin, this program aims to highlight his contribution behind the camera in the politically engaged cinema he made alongside Pierre Falardeau, as a vital partner in the creation of an uncompromising body of work. In charge of sound recording and accompanying the filmmaker during shoots that confronted them with political realities that became a source of outrage and awareness under their watchful eye, Poulin found in these experiences the origins of a corporeal cinema that would never leave their work.
It's the disciplining of bodies in Le Magra, a film about police training and the institutionalisation of violence, which perfectly prefigures all the slapstick comedy that would later make Elvis Gratton famous, with his gymnastic antics, his body deranged by Americanism, kneeling in the face of federalism.
They are also the Algerian farmers in À force de courage, the working-class labour force that details its resource -sharing, its fight against management and its return to a post-colonial polyculture. In this side-step taken far from Montreal, Falardeau and Poulin give volume to their commitment, decontextualising it from Quebec independence and placing it within a global struggle against human exploitation.
These two works give us a better understanding of the intellectual nuances of a duo who have too often been portrayed as two likeable buffoons, but whose depth of observation and analysis have made them two of our most formidable filmmakers.
Spotlight on Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin was programed by Mathieu Li-Goyette and presented on July 9, 2025 as part of the vidéo-club series, a Vidéographe initiative in collaboration with Cinéma Moderne. Every three months, Vidéographe invites cinephiles and the cine-curious to an evening of screening and discussion around a program drawn from works in the collection.
