The best Louise Portal’s drama movies

In this belated sequel to 'The Decline of the American Empire', 50-something Montreal college professor, Remy, learns that he is dying of liver cancer. He decides to make amends meet to his friends and family before he dies. He first tries to made peace with his ex-wife Louise, who asks their estranged son Sebastian, a successful businessman living in London, to come home. Sebastian makes the impossible happen, using his contacts and disrupting the entire Canadian system in every way possible to help his father fight his terminal illness to the bitter end, while he also tries to reunite his former friends, Pierre, Alain, Dominique, Diane, and Claude to see their old friend before he passes on.

Four very different Montreal university teachers gather at a rambling country house to prepare a dinner. Remy (married), Claude (a homosexual), Pierre (involved with a girlfriend) and Alain (a bachelor) discuss sex, the female body and their affairs with them. Meanwhile, their four female guests, Louise (Remy's wife of 15 years), Dominique (a spinster), Diane (a divorcée) and Danielle (Pierre's girlfriend) are spending the time at a downtown health gym. They also discuss sex, the female body and, naturally, men. Later in the evening, they finally meet at the country house and have dinner. A ninth guest, named Mario, who used to know Diane, drops in on the group for some talk and has a surprise of his own.

Revealing women, showing men Dermatology professor Marie-Claire is embarking on a new project linking skin cells and sexuality, when unexpected events disrupt her professional, family and intimate life.

A couple in Québec deals with the pitfalls, pressure and high expectations of raising kids in a society obsessed with success and social media image.

In this French Canadian drama, the life of a paraplegic painter implodes when an old girlfriend comes back into his life and accuses him of raping her 15 years earlier.

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.

A photographer sets off toward a mysterious forest to find Boychuk, witness and victim of the Great Fire that swept through Northern Ontario at the turn of the 20th century. But before she arrives, she learns that Boychuck has just perished. Survivors of the long-ago fire, Tom and Charlie, two elderly men who have chosen to live out their last days in the woods, are introduced to Marie Desneige, whose 60 year institutionalization has only fueled her passion for life. Meanwhile, the photographer is discovering that Boychuck had been a painter, whose life’s work had been entirely inspired by the Great Fire. The story immerses us in a historical drama while captivating us with the strange lives of these men of the forest. Three men who, in choosing freedom above all else, made a deal with death.

Two women, a friendship. Two parallel love stories. Marianne has a passionate affair with Nino while the relationship of Lea and David is falling apart. While a couple is forming, another's becoming undone. Yet, the choice of the two friends remains the same: break up with the past and plunge into the unknown.

A family that does not conform to the social norms of a small village must suffer the intolerance of the other villagers when the mentally-challenged son falls in love with the schoolteacher.

A story of three female tourists who visit Haiti, in order to enjoy the sexual nature of the young men.

Séraphin unfolds against the severe and achingly beautiful landscape of rural Quebec in 1889, where young lovers are torn from each other when a bankrupt shopkeeper forces his daughter into an arranged marriage to save his business. But true love cannot be denied...

In a little village at the end of the 1890's, a young woman offends all the 'right-thinking' villagers by allowing men in her house in the absence of her husband. When he is found dead, all of the suspicion is directed towards the liberal woman. She is judged more for her morality then for the crime she is accused of. Her culpability is still a subject of debate today.

Tinamer is 27 years old when her mother dies. The funeral of this last one makes her relive certain events of her childhood which marked her forever.

A strike at a sawmill in a small Canadian town puts Steph and Piston out of work. They want to resurrect their band but Marie-Lou, Piston's ex-wife and the band's former lead singer is not enthusiastic about the idea. Meanwhile Steph is having realtionship trouble with Rose, an older woman that he's been seeing and drifts first to Marie-Lou and then to Charles, who once left town but is now back.

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.