GINA

Denys Arcand | Canada | 1975 | 95m

After being sent to rural Quebec to perform at a seedy motel, exotic dancer Gina (The Silent Partner’s Céline Lomez) establishes a friendship with a group of visiting documentary filmmakers and becomes aware of a lecherous Ski-Doo gang hiding out on an abandoned ship. Keenly aware of one another’s presence, Gina and the gang develop an antagonistic relationship that eventually leads to a horrific assault. But what these ski-masked snow deviants don’t realize is that Gina works for some of Montreal’s most dangerous criminals, and they’re on their way to enact an ugly revenge.

Denys Arcand, born in 1941 in Deschambault, Quebec, is a Quebecois film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer. He studied history at the Université de Montréal in the 1960s. A filmmaker whose style has evolved significantly over the course of his career, he is best known internationally for his two major successes: The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and its sequel, The Barbarian Invasions (2003), the only Canadian film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His work reflects the transformation of Quebec cinema, moving from incisive documentaries to fiction deeply rooted in the socio-cultural realities of the time. He then channelled his disappointment at the result of the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty into themes of personal emancipation. After achieving international acclaim in the early 2000s, he went back to his roots in the mid-2010s, exploring themes he holds dear in films like An Eye for Beauty (2014) and The Fall of the American Empire (2018).