Gilles Carle

Career overview

Gilles Carle was born on July 31, 1928, in Maniwaki, Quebec, Canada, and passed away on November 28, 2009. He was a Canadian filmmaker, director, screenwriter, and painter who became a key figure in the development of a commercial Quebec cinema. Before his career in film, he studied advertising at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Montreal and started the book edition company Les Editions de l'hexagone with poet Gaston Miron, where he wrote literature and cinema reviews. In 1955, he began working in graphic arts at Radio-Canada while continuing to write reviews for newspapers.

Carle joined the National Film Board of Canada in 1960. During his five years at the National Film Board, he was primarily constrained to shooting documentaries. In 1961, he signed his first film, Dimanche d'Amerique, which was a documentary about the Italian community of Montreal, and that same year he co-directed Manger with Louis Portugais. His innovative debut feature, La Vie heureuse de Leopold Z., tracked the adventures of a snowplough operator during a madcap Christmas Eve.

After the National Film Board rejected several of his projects, Carle began working independently. In 1971, he joined forces with Pierre Lamy to form Les Productions Carle-Lamy, which produced Claude Jutra's epic Kamouraska, Denys Arcand's early features, and all of Carle's early films. Throughout his career, Carle accumulated 37 known credits in directing.