David Simard
7 November 1979
Sept-Îles
David is a documentarist with a passion for contrasts. Open to the emotion evoked by the lives of the people he documents, he nevertheless tells their stories without ever losing sight of cinematic technique.
Since his arrival on the job market, David has led a double life as an advertiser who aspires to be an artist. He sees his specialization in corporate documentary work as a gateway that leads to auteur cinema. True to his roots, he remains, now and in the future, at the service of companies and agencies who appreciate the high technical quality of his artistic vision.
As an auteur filmmaker, David is the antithesis of Vice. His vision for documentary work is based on a foundation of thorough and substantive background work. In his films, David revisits the most significant political events of our time to give them a new reading. At the center of his reflection, then, is a melancholy inevitably invoked by the past retold and reinvented – a past both everpresent and recreated – and the loss invoked by a vanished utopia and the ghosts of unrealized freedoms. David observes and records the vicissitudes of his time with poetry and wonder, with irony and – sometimes – anger. His critical look at the present is built upon the remembered. David aims to reactivate the past to better understand the arc of history.
In art, there is a fine line between what is real and what is fiction. In David’s hands, the camera is not used to freeze a story in time but to bring it back to life, to create a new circumstance through the reminiscence of past circumstance. David is not afraid to use the tools of fiction to script reality and transcend the prosaic. In this way, imagination sculpts and forms everyday reality, which then becomes even more real than reality itself.