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Filmmaker Rock Demers (L) poses with Governor General Michaelle Jean after being awarded the rank of Companion in the Order of Canada at Rideau Hall in Ottawa February 22, 2008. The award recognizes outstanding achievement and service in various fields of human endeavour and is the country's highest honor for lifetime achievement. REUTERS/Chris Wattie (CANADA)
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For Rock Demers, the world was a story to be written, messy, full of joy, sadness and every emotion in between. People were like that, too – not all good, or all bad, but a mix of both. It is what drove him as a filmmaker and producer of a series of films called Contes pour tous (Tales for All) – a conviction that children deserved to see films that did not pander to them, avoid uncomfortable issues or tie things up neatly in a perfectly arranged bow.
Most important of all, they deserved to laugh.
“I had a very poor childhood but a very happy one,” he told Le Nouvelliste newspaper in 2014. “I think the more we give young people the chance to laugh, the better we prepare them to face life’s difficulties later on.”
Mr. Demers, who founded Les Productions La Fête in 1980, died on Aug. 17 at the Montreal Heart Institute after suffering heart failure. He left generations of children and grownups around the world bereft of a beloved master storyteller, whose tales included 1984′s La guerre des tuques (The Dog Who Stopped the War), about a small-town snowball fight to the death. He was 87 years old.
True to his vision of a cinema, and stories, for everyone, Mr. Demers, gentle of mien and round of belly, was a steadfast federalist in an era when many of his contemporaries were not, always launching his films in both French and English, with the happy result of making them accessible to wider audience outside Quebec’s and, ultimately, Canada’s borders. Occasionally, he engaged in co-productions with other countries, while some films, such as 1985′s The Peanut Butter Solution and 1988′s Tommy Tricker and Stamp Traveller, both directed by Michael Rubbo, were shot in English.
“Rock was the most wonderful producer I ever had, a delight to work with,” said Mr. Rubbo, who first met Mr. Demers in the National Film Board office in Montreal. “I loved the man.”
Actor Marina Orsini, who played a role in the 1988 film, La grenouille et la baleine (The Tadpole and the Whale), about a girl who can breathe underwater and befriends the dolphins and whales living the St. Lawrence River, called him “rigorous, determined, a man of the world who was able to turn dreams into reality.”
“Inclusion was his hallmark,” she said. “He loved films and he loved talking about them with other directors, with actors and the public. I’m sure that right up to the end, his mind and heart were full of new projects and ideas.”
And Dominic James, the director and producer whom Mr. Demers chose as his successor at La Fête, said that he was a wonderful, involved mentor.
“We got to meet a few days before he left us,” Mr. James recalled. “He was so passionate, asking about projects, how they were coming along. The very purpose of movies and movie-making inspired him, the sense of producing content that would resonate for years.”
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Rock Demers was born on Dec. 11, 1933, in Sainte-Cécile-de-Lévrard, a tiny farming community about 50 kilometres east of Trois-Rivières, near the banks of the St. Lawrence. The eldest of eight children, his father was a farmer and his mother, a teacher.
Young Rock, who learned to read before he even went to school, spent his childhood learning to appreciate nature in all its forms, from the lushness of summer to the starkness in winter, when the light became flat and seemed to go on forever. Although he dreamed big, his dreams were filled with the family values he learned from his parents.
At the age of 11, he was sent to boarding school in Victoriaville for a few years; his education was then interrupted after he slipped one winter and fractured his skull. As he recuperated, he worked as a lumberjack, albeit one who was erudite and spent what spare time he had writing love letters to the girlfriends and wives of his fellow workers.
Upon moving to Montreal in the early 1950s, his uncle introduced him to the movies, namely, the Irving Berlin-composed musical Annie Get Your Gun. Mr. Demers fell in love then and there with movies and decided he wanted to be a dancer like Fred Astaire, even going so far as to buy a pair of tap shoes; as he recounted to journalist Franco Nuovo in a 2019 radio interview, they collected dust in his closet until he traded them for an electric razor, which he used exactly once before deciding to grow the beard that adorned his face for the rest of his life.
His interest in film and filming techniques was so great that at one point he got a scholarship of $2,500 to travel to Paris to study audiovisual arts. When the program ended a few months later, he had $250 to pay for a ship back to Canada, money he decided was better spent on travelling behind the Iron Curtain and beyond.
He lived carefully on $1 a day, visiting Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, forming friendships, including one with Czech puppeteer Bretislav Pojar, which would last a lifetime. For the first time in his life, he understood that he could devote his life to telling universal stories for children.
From the Iron Curtain, Mr. Demers moved on to Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, where he witnessed the chaotic aftermath of British colonial rule, and finally, by boat to Japan, where another world opened up to him.
Upon his return to Canada, he set himself to establishing his dream, entrenching himself in the world of film. In 1963, he became one of the founders of the Cinémathèque québécoise, the conservatory that collects, documents and preserves Quebec-made film and television productions. Two years later, he started his first film distribution company, Faroun Films, which specialized in children’s cinema but also distributed more adult fare, such as Gilles Carle’s Les males (The Men), a 1971 crime caper.
From 1962 to 1967, Mr. Demers ran the Montreal World Film Festival; he remained close to its founder and president, Serge Losique, who told La Presse that his friend was a great humanist.
“He always defended the most just of causes,” Mr. Losique said. “His contribution to Quebec culture is such that I hope he gets a state funeral.”
And in 1977 – three years before he founded La Fête – he was named president and director-general of what was then known as Institut québécois du cinema.
Driven in part by a story he had in 1982 in La Presse about depression and suicide amongst youth, he devoted his career to the children’s cinema, to listening to what children and adolescents had to say, and promoting cultural exchanges between them all over the world.
UNESCO lauded Bach et Bottine (Bach and Broccoli), the third film in the Contes pour tous series, about a little girl who lives with her uncle and manages to collect a menagerie of animals, including a pet skunk, as one that children around the world should see with their parents.
In 1987, the Quebec government gave him the Albert Tessier Prize for his accomplishments in cinema, while in 1998, received the Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award, the highest such honour in the land.
In 1991, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and he was promoted to a Companion in 2007.
“Rock was really a kid at heart, even at 87, and that was why he was so good at making these movies,” Mr. James said. “He knew that life was hard, but he also knew it was worth living because there was a lot of magic. That was the message he wanted to get across in every single one of his movies and through that, he inspired generations of story tellers – and storytelling.”
Mr. Demers leaves his wife, Vivianne Julien, and his son, Jean Demers.