Patrick Boivin

Whether crafting an innovative stop-motion cartoon or directing a festival-favorite short film, Patrick Boivin was known for the daring and original. Perhaps his flair for the unusual came from the fact that the filmmaker was self-taught, ignoring the rules and regulations of film making when it suited his artistic purposes. A darling of the YouTube set, Boivin produced provocative and clever films, both animated and live action, that tested the boundaries of storytelling in video. Born and raised in Montreal in the 1970s, Patrick Boivin started his artistic life as a creator in the world of comic books. However, he quickly decided that as much as he loved the medium, he could tell his story much faster with film than he could by writing and drawing his own comic book. But the visual storytelling he learned in that industry continued to inspire and direct much of his work. His first major short, "Radio," was produced in 2005. He both wrote and directed the short live-action piece on the perils of modern media inducing public fear. He continued his dissection of modern media in "La Lettre" (2006), where he introduced steam-punk visuals and some limited stop-motion animation to explore the complexities of communication. Boivin continued with shorts, gradually moving into more complicated animation until he teamed up with fellow French-Canadian director Olivier Roberge on "Enfin, l'automne" (Fall, Finally) (2011). Boivin's first venture into feature presentations led to future explorations away from the short film format. Boivin and Roberge followed their first film with the tense "Bunker" (2014), a thriller about an incipient nuclear strike.