Céline Baril is a Fine Arts graduate of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has several major solo exhibitions to her credit. Her work, which mainly combined sculpture, photography and video, naturally led her to filmmaking. In 1989, she produced and directed her first experimental film, Barcelone, a sensitive exploration of landscapes, both visual and sonic, and the people who inhabit them. The Ant and the Volcano (1992) is a fiction film shot in black and white featuring an all-Chinese cast of non-professional actors. Baril drew great inspiration from them and their stories to make this film, voiced-over in Cantonese. A finalist for the Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois’s André Leroux award, the film won the Quebec-Alberta prize. Then followed The Absent One (1997), a film based on one family’s photo albums found in a Paris flea market. Narrative played a prominent role in this first feature film, paving the way for her first fiction film, Games of the Heart (2001).
Between 2001 and 2003, the filmmaker directed a few short-fiction films, including Giselle (2003) and Le décompte (2001), whose script was co-written by a dozen students from the École d’Éducation Internationale. Baril prolonged the experience by spending a year in a high school in an underprivileged area of Montreal, returning with Life Times 538 (2005), a first full-length, exceedingly timely documentary produced by the National Film Board. Over the course of an entire year, she singlehandedly filmed and recorded a handful of individuals, discretely bearing witness to daily life at the school. Over the course of 90 minutes, Baril paints an original portrait of the school and introduces us to the people behind the anonymous mass of so-called “problem” students. Then came The Theory of Everything, a feature documentary completed in April 2009.
Filmography
24 Davids (2017 / 132 min)
Room Tone (2014 / 45 min)
LA Théorie du tout (The Theory of Everything) (2009 / 79 min)
538 Fois la vie (538 time life) (2005 / 92 min)
Giselle (2003 / 15 min)
Du pic au cœur (Games of The Heart) (2001 / 85 min)
L'Absent (The Absent One) (1997 / 78 min)
La Fourmi et le volcan (The Ant and The Volcano) (1992 / 52 min)
Barcelone (1989 / 40 min)
