Mr. Speaker, Xavier Dolan, a young Quebec filmmaker, swept three of the four prizes awarded during the Directors' Fortnight, a sidebar to the Cannes Film Festival.
Dolan wrote the script for his film, J'ai tué ma mère, at 17, then directed it at 19, starring in the film alongside Anne Dorval. His feature won the independent cinema programmers' Art Cinema Award, the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques prize for best French-language film, and the Regards Jeunes prize, for a first or second feature film.
Flabbergasted, the young director said of his largely self-financed film, “Never in my life have I felt so proud and so happy to belong to our nation, the Quebec nation”.
Now it is the Bloc Québécois' turn to tell him how proud we are of him and of the honour he has brought to Quebec at Cannes. We wish him a tremendously prolific career.