Even though the protagonist of the Canadian Femme De L'Hotel is a female filmmaker, one would think twice before suggesting that this effort by Swiss-born director Lea Pool is autobiographical. Paule Baillargeon portrays a well-known director who returns to her home town of Montreal to film a high-budget musical drama. At her hotel, Paule has a brief but unsettling encounter with a suicidal elderly woman (Louise Marleau). This element of the plot is briefly forgotten as we get to know the actors in Paule's current project. Then she meets the old lady again, and with mounting incredulity Paule discovers that the actual events in the woman's life mirror the fictional events in the director's film.

Pierre is a Montreal photojournalist who returns from Nicaragua to find that his ten-year menage a trois is over. Haunted by his mid-life crisis, he becomes obsessed with trying to find out why his two lovers, Sarah and David, have left him.

Aïcha is a troubled teenage girl who cannot forgive her mother for kicking out the stepfather she adored. Aïcha longs for him to come back and take her away. When she meets Baz, a man twice her age, it’s love at first sight for her; the real kind, the one that hurts. Baz wants to help this lost little girl, but she wants much more from him, and is ready to do anything to get it.

Valérie Kaprisky and Jean-François Pichette star in this predictable story of two people, a single mom (Kaprisky) and a man (Pichette), who meet on a train going from Montreal to Vancouver, a very long ride across Canada that gives them plenty of time to become romantically involved. Viewers may find that the evolution of the romance is as obvious as the train chugging along one track to its inevitable destination.
Moody, sensual, quietly compelling and, ultimately, engaging romantic drama with good performances and dialogue. Pool's best film, and certainly her most accessible...though still given to pretentious dream sequences and visuals. But at least they aren't a substitute for story or character this time around.

Anne Trister follows director Léa Pool's route in life from youth in French speaking Switzerland to adulthood in Quebec in Canada. The film deals with issues of child abuse and bi-sexuality as well as the quest to find roots.
Art student Anne Trister has, like Lea Pool, a Jewish father and a gentile mother. Her father's death is what moves her to leave school and her lover in Switzerland behind and travel to Montreal in Canada for the last rites.
She stays with an older friend Alix, a child psychiatrist absorbed by the case of an abused little girl. Alix tries to help Anne to relate to her Jewish roots by telling her about a trip to the desert she once made. Anne is fascinated by the story and by Alix and falls in love with her.
In the meantime she expresses her feelings in art by creating a fantastic mural of the desert on the walls of a studio lent to her by one of her father's old friends.
However, Alix chooses for a man in her life and disturbed by her rejection Anne falls from scaffolding in her studio. When she comes to in hospital her studio and with it her dream world has been torn down. Now she must face reality and be free.
In the closing shots Alix receives a parcel containing a handful of sand and a short film of Anne in the desert.
The soundtrack prominently features a chanson by Danielle Messiah (De la main gauche) that lends the film much of its mood.

Christmas approaches and the Lévesque family has once again gathered for their traditional celebration. But this time there is a mixture of emotions running through each person. The patriarch of the family suffers from a combination of Parkinson’s Disease and heart failure. His life reduced in every way, the end approaches and there are unhappy memories of his once violent and authoritarian past. But his wife, ten children and many grandchildren try to maintain a semblance of the Christmas season.

A coming-of-age tale centered on Hannah, a young girl who is living a troubled family life. Set in 1963, Hannah develops a fascination with Jean-Luc Godard's then-recent film "Vivre sa vie". As she begins to model herself after the film's lead role, Hannah slowly begins to explore the confusing nature of her sexuality.