Anne Émond

Biography

Anne Émond (born 1982) is a Canadian film director and screenwriter, currently based in Montreal, Quebec. Since then, she has written and directed seven short films including L'Ordre des choses (2009), Naissances (2009), Sophie Lavoie (2009) and Plus rien ne vouloir (2011). L'Ordre des choses won the Coop Vidéo Prize for Best Director in 2009 at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois. It was also nominated for the Claude Jutra Award. Naissances was chosen as one of the Toronto International Film Festival's top ten Canadian short films of 2009 and was nominated at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. Émond's short film Sophie Lavoie won the best short-film for the Festival du Nouveau Cinema.[citation needed] Her debut feature film, Nuit #1, succeeded in cementing her personal style – a style characterized by long takes, theatrical monologues, and thematics such as youth loneliness and female sexuality. Émond won the Claude Jutra Award for the year's best feature film by a first-time director at the 2012 Genie Awards. Her second feature film, Our Loved Ones (Les êtres chers), premiered to positive reviews at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2015, and had its Canadian premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The story begins in 1978 in a small village on the Lower St. Lawrence, as the Leblanc family is rocked by the tragic death of Guy. In December, the film was announced as part of TIFF's annual Canada's Top Ten screening series of the ten best Canadian feature films of the year. In 2016 Émond received the Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize, awarded to an emerging artist by the Toronto Film Critics Association, for Our Loved Ones. The film received seven Quebec Cinema Award nominations at the 18th Quebec Cinema Awards, for Best Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Maxim Gaudette), Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Hairstyling. Her third film, Nelly is based on the life of Canadian novelist Nelly Arcan. In 2017 she was the patron and curator of the Festival Vues dans la tête de... film festival in Rivière-du-Loup.