The best Alain Gendreau’s drama movies

Three stories about the world of opioids collide: a drug trafficker arranges a multi-cartel Fentanyl smuggling operation between Canada and the U.S., an architect recovering from an OxyContin addiction tracks down the truth behind her son's involvement with narcotics, and a university professor battles unexpected revelations about his research employer, a drug company with deep government influence bringing a new "non-addictive" painkiller to market.

In Montreal, the teenagers Manon, Anne, Isa, Claudie and Sophie are friends since their childhood. While spending a couple of days in the cottage of Sophie's parents nearby a lake, the girls decide to give a party, and Manon and Sophie hitch for a ride to the town in a jeep to buy some beers and supplies and they invite the driver to the party. On the return, the same driver stops the car and later Sophie is found stabbed, raped and covered of blood. Fifteen years later, Manon sees the guy in a car-wash and she invites her former friends to return to the house nearby the lake, where wounds of their traumatic loss are disclosed.

Henri was raised by religious in a convent and lived with them until the women, now elders, moved, leaving him alone. Henri fixes lamps. Since his young age, he's been replacing burned light bulbs and illuminates people's lives. After following signs, he finds himself working in a lamp company. Through his new work, he meets an old man trying to never forget his glory days and a blind woman, teller in an adult cinema, with whom he falls in love.

In this tragicomedy, Toni is the director of a staged rendition of Othello in Montreal. It is a pet project of his, financed by his loving mafia uncle. Unbeknownst to him, the audiences are also rounded up (and paid) by the same uncle. Some of them have seen every performance of this tragic play, and are understandably bored, so when the backstage romantic shenanigans of the actors result in absurd situations onstage, the audience is delighted. There are a huge number of romantic situations going on in this film at the same time. One of them involves Gaston a somewhat world-weary jazz musician, and Florence, a glamorous middle-aged woman who has been pining for him for years. Another involves to members of the musician's jazz trio. Yet another involves the play's Desdemona, Soledad, the girlfriend of the man playing Othello, who can't keep his hands off his (female) dresser.

Paul à Québec is quite simply about life, at its happiest and at its most challenging. Paul and his in-laws offer us a window onto the everyday life of the Beaulieu family, but we also witness the decline of his father-in-law, Roland. Paul à Québec is a hymn to life that reminds us, among other things, of the beauty of those small moments when, in spite of the farewells, life shows us how important it is to savour every instant.

A young girl who is being abused at home runs away to the seamy side of Montreal where she makes friends with a prostitute who helps her to survive the urban jungle.