BIOGRAPHY
Director’s Biography
Léa Pool was born in Soglio, Switzerland in 1950. After teaching for several years she decided to shift her focus completely to film. In 1978 she moved to Québec where she directed her first short documentary film Laurent Lamerre, portier. A year later, she wrote, directed and produced her first long-feature : Strass café . The film, shot in black and white, was particularly well received internationally and won several awards namely at the festival of Sceaux in France (1981). Especially comfortable with a more intimate, subdued form of cinema, Léa Pool’s narratives center often on strong and passionate female characters as in La Femme de l'hôtel (1984), Anne Trister (1986) and Emporte-moi (1999) with Pascale Bussières. In 1991, She was one of six canadian filmmakers chosen to direct a vignette in the ensemble piece Montréal vu par… In 2001, she shot her first anglophone film entitled Rebelles , a smart, sensual film in which three adolescent girls (Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré and Mischa Barton) awaken to their own sexuality. Having travelled to Nicaragua for À Corps Perdu, back to the Swiss Alps for La Demoiselle Sauvage, and to Costa Rica for Le papillon bleu, Léa Pool returns to Montreal to shoot the intense family drama : La dernière fugue, the long awaited adaptation of Gil Courtemanche’s remarkable novel « Une belle mort » which deals with the ways in which a family must come to terms with the impending death of their patriarch.