Jacques Thisdale

This experimental short documents the clash, sometimes obsessive, sometimes glorifying, between humans and their mechanized environment. Using photographs, the animator creates varying perspectives through optical manipulation and changing colour, achieving bold and provocative effects.

In 1837, in Quebec, against a historical backdrop of rebellion against the English, we follow the sentimental drama of Simon de Bellefeuille and Julie, the chosen one of his heart, destined for another.

Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.

In 1940, two sisters work in an ammunition factory, but dream of marriage.

A television host tries to react to the process of alienation that the public is subjected to from variety shows.

A widow must cope with her late husband's associates, crooked Japanese businessmen who want her shares of a rich Northern Quebec land and a Jewish con man who wants to get a hand of her mysterious synthetic fur coat.

In 1942 even after a formal promise from the Liberal Party of Canada in the last election: "Never the Conscription", the Canadian Government vote a Conscription Law. In Quebec where the French population was mostly unanimous against the obligation to go to war, seen as a Great-Britain Government request, many young men fled to the woods or in clandestineness.

A down-and-out man who got separated, gets his second chance in a boarding house, thanks to a friend who is a con man, and falls in love with a roommate. However, when he gets a job, his ego gets over and might lose everything he got.

Industrial pollution causes water poisoning and generalized sickness in a nearby city and is the start of a major news scandal.

A meditation on society's attitudes and beliefs, as explored through a New France fur trapper's relationship with a Native woman that spans centuries.

A seemingly idle guy and an unprincipled girl to whom everything seems to come easily will see their lives sealed in a brutal way.

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

Dramatic reenactments of major Quebec trials.