Rodrigue Jean (born in Caraquet, New Brunswick)[1] is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and producer of Acadian origin. He has been a theatre director, dancer and choreographer.
While pursuing university studies, he developed in the 1980s a practice as a dancer and choreographer.[2] In 1986, he went to Japan to train with Tanaka Min. With Tedi Tafel (choreography and performance), Jacques Perron (photography) and Monique Jean (music), he founded Les Productions de l'Os in 1986. A series of performances resulted from this collaboration, which culminated in 1989 with the creation of his first choregraphed short film, La déroute.
Rodrigue Jean then directed three award-winning feature films: the Acadian trilogy Full Blast (1999), Yellowknife (2001) and Lost Song (2008), that earned him the recognition of critics and made his name as a leading filmmaker. In 2005, with the documentary Living on the Edge, he celebrated the work of the Acadian poet Gérald Leblanc.
During a stay in London in the early 1990s, he worked as a theatre director. He also organised video workshops at Streetwise Youth, a sex worker centre in London (1991–98).[3] Between 2005 and 2007, after several decades trying to fund this project, he directed the documentary Men for Sale, offering a striking portrait of sex workers in downtown Montreal.[3] In 2009, he founded Epopée, a film action group born out of a co-creation project with the participants of Men for Sale. With Epopée, he deepened his engagement with sex workers, in collaboration with the organization RÉZO.[4][5]
This collective work, composed of documentaries and fiction films, led to the creation of the installationL’État des lieux (2012), and two feature films, L’État du moment (2012) and L’État du monde (2012).[3] Deepening his research into misrepresented lives, and in continuation with Men for Sale and Epopée, he directed in 2014 the fiction feature Love in the Time of Civil War.
Besides the project on masculine sex work, the collective launched the installation Fractions, presented at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in 2016, and the triptych Insurgence (2013), Rupture (2016), and Contrepoint (2016) on the great political and social movement launched by the 2012 Quebec Student Strike. Epopée also worked on the massive incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada, with the installation The Reappearance of Sheri Pranteau (2018), which was presented as a triptych at the Joliette Museum of Art.
His latest feature film, The Acrobat, was released in 2020.
Navigating between documentary and fiction, often mixing genres, and combining ethics and aesthetics, Rodrigue Jean develops a cinematic practice, either by representing people who are deprived of a voice, or by inventing characters driven by their impulses and their desires. Through these two practices of cinema, he examines and questions the constructions of identity and sexuality that stand up against the imperatives of any form of normativity.[2]
