罗德里格·让 Rodrigue Jean

Never short of projects, Rodrigue Jean has been active on every creative front. Currently, he is a film director, writer and producer. In the 1980s, following studies in biology, sociology and literature, he began working in live performance as a dancer and choreographer. In 1989, he turned to filmmaking, and his first short film, La Déroute, was based on choreography from his dance company, Les Productions de l’Os. In the 1990s, he received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to study choreography and theatre directing in London, where he discovered the worlds of Shakespeare, Jean Genet and Brad Fraser. Back in New Brunswick, he founded the film and video production house Transmar Films.

Rodrigue Jean then made two documentaries: La Voix des rivières in 1995, winner of the Telefilm Canada Prize for Best Medium-Length Canadian film at the Festival International du Cinéma Francophone en Acadie; and in 1996, La Mémoire de l’eau, a prizewinner at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax. He followed these with two critically acclaimed fiction films that were equally popular with audiences: Full Blast, co-produced by Films de l’Isle and Transmar Films, which won a Special Jury Citation at TIFF in 1999, and Yellowknife, a co-production for the first time between three Canadian provinces (New Brunswick, Quebec and Manitoba), winner of the award for Best Quebec Film of 2002 as chosen by film critics (the AQCC).

Staying close to his Acadian roots, Rodrigue Jean paid tribute to poet Gérald Leblanc in his 2005 documentary L’Extrême Frontière, an NFB production selected at FICFA in Moncton and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. In 2006, he returned to the milieu of sex workers and drug addicts, a culture he was familiar with from his time in London, where he led video workshops at a centre for street kids. The resulting film, Men for Sale, is a hard-hitting documentary about male hustlers that challenges our indifference to those relegated to the fringes of s