Joëlle Desjardins Paquette

Montreal-born writer-director Joëlle Desjardins Paquette enjoys cinema that lights up the spirit. Her fiction work is inspired by everyday poetry that she transposes in her art in an offbeat manner. Her formal and graphic aesthetics carries the audience into a elegant and absurd world of its own, combining bittersweet humor and fantasy. Her films flirt between humanist drama and black comedy. After a stint of film studies in Bordeaux, France, Joëlle completed a BFA at UQAM in 2006. She began her film career with the release of two shorts that have earned accolades on the festival circuit, Paparmane [Wintergreen] (TIFF Canada's Top 10 - 2012, Best Comedy Award - Yorkton Film Festival) and Sans dehors ni dedans [Within & Without] (Grand Jury Prize - Festival des films de la relève 2014). Her new short film Flots gris [Beyond Blue Waves] was premiered at IFFR 2016 in Rotterdam. Parallel to her work in cinema, she is involved in a variety of projects including directing in television and advertising.