Share on Facebook
Share on X
Share by Email
Share on Google Classroom
Anne Claire Poirier, OC, OQ, film director, producer, writer (born 6 June 1932 in St-Hyacinthe, QC; died 28 September 2026 in Outremont, QC). A pioneer of feminist films, Anne Claire Poirier won the Albert-Tessier Prize in 1988 and received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in 2001. She was made a Chevalière of the Ordre national du Québec in 1985 and was promoted to Officière in 2008. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2003 “for launching feminist cinema in Quebec” and being “a leading light in Canadian cinematography.”
Anne Claire Poirier joined the National Film Board (NFB) in 1960, eventually going into film direction, which had been essentially a male preserve. Her first full-length film, De mère en fille (1968), dealt with the physical and emotional experience of pregnancy. It was the first feature film in Quebec to be directed by a woman. In 1973, Poirier produced the "En tant que femmes" series, which offered female film producers their first organized platform for expression. In this series, Poirier directed Les Filles du roy (1974) and Le Temps de l'avant (1975), the latter a sensitive study of the abortion issue. She then produced the powerful Mourir à tue-tête (1979), a film about rape. La Quarantaine (1982) deals with the critical fifth decade of a person's life.
In 1988, Poirier directed Salut Victor!, a TV movie about old age, loneliness and homosexuality, adapted from the Canadian writer Edward O. Phillips. The next year, for the 50th anniversary of the NFB, she made a montage compiling evidence of the evolving attention paid by male and female filmmakers in the NFB to the lot of women. Tu as crié LET ME GO (1997), ponders an event that overturned the Poirier's life: the murder of her daughter. It won the 1997 Genie Award for Best Feature Documentary.
