Marquise Lepage

Her most recent film, Apapacho, was released in 2019.

Lepage’s career began in 1983, when she became an associate for production company Les Productions du Lundi matin, which had notable Quebec film producer Marcel Simard at its head. Simard gave Lepage her first break when she directed Marie s’en va-t-en ville, her first feature film. The movie is about a love story between Marie, a thirteen year-old runaway, and Sarah, a prostitute in her forties. Lepage stayed with the Les Productions du Lundi matin until 1991.

Youth Award and Prix de l’État du Valais at Festival International Médias Nord-Sud (Geneva, Switzerland);

Lepage founded Les Productions du Cerf-Volant in 2008. After producing several web projects and TV movies on her own, she wrote, directed, and produced One Night Stand: A Modern Love Story, a mix between a romantic comedy and a drama. It tells the story a young filmmaker in her thirties (played by Annick Fontaine) who has a heavy secret which complicates her already unstable love life. The film was produced independently, without the help of Canadian funding institutions. Some of the funds were raised through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The initial goal was $15,000 but she raised $16,780 in two months. The film was released on May 29th, 2016 in two theatres, one in Montreal and another in Quebec City. It remained in theatres for two weeks and was ranked 18th among 32 other Quebec films in terms of admissions.

Lepage is known for directing fiction films and documentaries with a social twist. In an interview in 2015, she declared herself a feminist.

In 2013, as a sequel to Martha of the North, Lepage released the documentary web series and educational website Iqqaumavara. The website presents 12 short films and some information about the High Arctic relocation. It is available in French, English and Inuktitut.

Lepage's preoccupation with social injustices was reflected in her 2009 feature documentary Martha of the North (Martha qui vient du froid). It tells the story of Martha Flaherty, granddaughter of documentarian Robert Flaherty, who, along with her family and dozen other Inuit, was "displaced by the Canadian government and left to their own devices in the Far North" in the 1950s as part of the High Arctic relocation. It took over two years for Marquise to convince Martha to tell her story and it took more than six years of production before the film was released. The film was well received by critics and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Gémeaux Awards. On August 18, 2010, following its release, the Canadian Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, "issued an apology to Inuit relocatees, their families, and all Inuit, for relocating Inuit families to the High Arctic and for the hardship and suffering caused by the relocation."

In 2008, she created her own production company, Les Productions du Cerf-Volant. The first fiction film she directed and produced for the company was One Night Stand: A Modern Love Story (Ce qu'il ne faut pas dire), which came out in theatres in May 2015.

From 2007 to 2012, she was president of Réalisatrices Équitables (RÉ), which she initiated with the help of other québécoises filmmakers. RÉ is "a non-profit organization founded in 2007. Its members are Québec female professional film directors".

A perpetual issue explored in Lepage's works, both documentaries and fictions, is childhood and injustices affecting children. She received the Golden Sheaf Award for Best Social Documentary for Of Hopscotch and Little Girls (Des marelles et des petites filles) in 2000, a movie which tells the story of girls around the world who suffer from poverty, forced labour or sexual abuse.

Lepage has two children, twins Alice and Jérémie, born in 1995. She named her daughter after Alice Guy-Blaché, about whom she made the documentary The Lost Garden (Le Jardin oublié) in 1995. Marquise has been living in the Villeray neighborhood of Montreal for over 20 years. In 2015, in order to finance the post-production of her latest feature film Ce qu’il ne faut pas dire (One Night Stand: A Modern Love Story), she decided to sell the house where she raised her children.

In 1991, she was hired by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) where she worked until 1994. There, she directed Dans ton pays, a short film about two elementary-school classmates from different racial groups who become friends. She also directed her second feature film, a children’s movie titled La fête des rois, starring a young Marc-André Grondin.

Lepage was president of the Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec (ARRQ) for two years, from 1990 to 1991.

In a 1987 interview, Marquise said her work was influenced, among others, by the Quebecois films Good Riddance (Les Bons débarras), Sonatine, and Ça peut pas être l'hiver, on n'a même pas eu d'été.

Marquise Lepage (born September 6, 1959 in Chénéville, Quebec), is a Canadian (Québécoise) producer, screenwriter, and film and television director. She is best known for her 1987 feature Marie in the City (Marie s'en va-t-en ville), for which she received a nomination for Best Director at the 9th Genie Awards in 1988. She was also a nominee for Best Live Action Short Drama at the 14th Genie Awards in 1993 for Dans ton pays. She was hired by the National Film Board (NFB) as a filmmaker in 1991. One of her first major projects for the NFB was The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché, a documentary about female cinema pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché.

Born in 1959, Lepage is the seventh child of a family of nine. The first film she saw as a child was Disney’s Bambi. After high school, she went on to study social sciences at Cégep de Saint-Jérôme. She had no family members working in the film business and had only basic knowledge of cinema when she decided to pursue her post-secondary studies in Communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM): "I knew nothing about the industry or anyone who had anything to do with cinema ... I walked into it with great naivety. But it served me. If I had seen the big picture and all that it takes to succeed, I might have been scared!" She went on to complete a Masters in Film Studies at Université de Montréal.

Lepage is preoccupied with discrimination made against women, but also with the underrepresentation of women in the film industry: "The imagination and creativity of women are not exploited enough on screen. It seems to me that a gap that needs to be filled." Her concerns were at the basis of her documentary The Lost Garden (Le Jardin oublié) about French-American filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché who lived from 1873 to 1968 and directed over 1,000 films but was forgotten by history. The film won Best Auteur Documentary at the Gémeaux Awards in 1996.