About
Born in St-Hyacinthe, Québec, Canada, I first came to Japan in 1970, at the age of twenty, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. I spent ten years in Japan where I made my first movies, including my first feature film, “Keiko”, shot when I was twenty-eight. “Keiko” was well received by the critics and won several prestigious awards that make me quite proud.
I went back to Quebec at the end of the ‘70s and lived there for the next thirty some years, writing, directing and producing seven more films of my own, while producing another 12 or so feature films with my wife Yuri Yoshimura and later on with our son Samuel. We had three successful production, distribution and export companies for twenty some years. Aska Films distributed several quality Quebec as well as International films. Angelopulos, Wong Kar-Wai (3 times), Imamura, Tavernier, Kaurismaki, Chen Kaige and so many others are some of the directors for which we fought to distribute their films as decently as it could be done.
In 2009, I decided to come to Japan and help Yuri with the distribution of our last production, “Looking For Anne”, directed by my long time assistant, Takako Miyahira. This is for this last movie that we leave on a more than two months trip all over Japan in order to bring some fresh air in the movie distribution in Japan…
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