Roger D'Astous

Jour de juin

This film is an in-camera portrait of the place Ville Marie Royal Bank Building in Montréal.

This short documentary profiles Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade in Montreal in 1959. The annual parade takes place every June 24th in memory of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the patron saint of Québec. Candid shots of youngsters preparing their costumes for the festivities are partnered with a lively jazz soundtrack. All the Montrealers and out-of-town tourists featured in this film avidly participate in a public festivity that is dear to their hearts.

With the help of a team of experts and the latest in 3-D scanning technology, Alexander Armstrong, along with Dr Michael Scott, explores the hidden underground treasures that made Rome the powerhouse of the ancient world.

A short documentary about the works of Cassiano Branco, a modernist architect from Portugal

With the participation of famed architects such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman: Making Architecture Move provides an intimate look into the work of the daring and controversial creator. Filmed in the U.S. and Germany, Eisenman takes the viewer through several of his buildings, including the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, while explaining his upcoming projects such as the Rebstockpark community in Frankfurt and the Max Reinhardt monument in Berlin. His predecessors and contemporaries offer praise and commentary on Eisenman's complex body of work including their own thoughts and theories surrounding his unique style.

First look inside the walls of Quebec police’s training grounds and the realities of our next generation of police officers.

Desperate to recover from his depression, Dave travels from his home in British Columbia, Canada to Peru in order to experience the healing effects of the sacred medicine ayahuasca. After Dave spends some time in the country, a Shipibo healer begins to teach him how to work with the medicine more deeply.

Living Space is a film about the relationship between architecture and illness. It follows the construction of a new cancer care centre designed by the architect Frank Gehry and acts as a record of the process behind, and the achievement of, creating space especially for people affected by cancer.

Documentary about the architecture of the Swedish housing boom in the 1960s and how it's viewed today.

Through concerts and interviews, folk-progressive group Harmonium takes Quebec culture to California. This documentary full of colour and sound, filmed in California in 1978, recounts the ups and downs of the journey of the Quebec musical group Harmonium, who came to feel the pulse of Americans and see if culture, their culture, can succeed in crossing borders.

Loto-Québec : La morale de l'argent

Through the eyes of a Quebec Jewish activist, Lea Roback, feminist, unionist, pacifist and communist, A VISION IN THE DARKNESS proposes a modernist vision of Quebec history, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the period knows as « La Grande Noirceur », the Great Darkness.

Dans nos forêts

French architect Jean Nouvel has long been known in Europe for his bold, shimmering glass museums, concert halls, and high-rise towers. Now the much-acclaimed new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which opened in 2006, is displaying Nouvel's remarkable talents to an American public. With a cantilevered lobby that extends 175 feet over the Mississippi River, the dark midnight-blue, aluminum-paneled structure has captivated the culturally conscious city and helped spur the rejuvenation of a once-industrial waterfront. In the tour, Nouvel takes us through three distinctive theaters he designed for the Guthrie, and out onto the cantilevered deck to view the legendary river that inspired the boldly elevated design.

Not many people know that there is in the center of Hong Kong, a city of 50,000 inhabitants that escape authority, a city which holds no law and no order, the ‘walled city’. Never before has a television crew been allowed to enter this labyrinth. Christa Wesemann, an Austrian documentary filmmaker, has achieved this for the first time. The recordings from the ‘walled city’ are breathtaking pictures, as it has never seen the world. The history and daily flow in Walled City are ruled by the ‘triad’, a Chinese crime syndicate.

Saint-Pierre : la basilique de tous les records

How did ancient Egyptians build the Great Pyramid at Giza, joining two million blocks of heavy stone with amazing precision? Who were the leaders who built these enormous structures, and what did these tombs signify? Host David Macaulay explores the history, mythology, and religions of Egypt's people, combining live footage and animation. Take a rare look at the mummy of Ramses II and buried treasure in the sacred Valley of the Kings.

For the first time, cloistered sisters agree to be filmed for one year in all aspects of their lives. The nuns of Berthierville, the only Francophone community of Dominican nuns in North America for nearly a century, engage in a rare and unique documentary in which exceptional testimonies and archives intermingle.

Le Sacré-Coeur : Mégastructure historique