Journalist-in-Residence

Francine Pelletier is an award-winning bilingual journalist and filmmaker. She was named journalist-in-residence in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of documentary journalism within the department.

Pelletier’s 40-year journalism career began with her involvement with the women’s movement in the late 1970s. She was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the feminist monthly magazine La Vie en Rose from 1980 to 1986 and wrote a weekly social and political column for Montreal’s largest French daily La Presse.  Later, she worked as a Quebec parliamentary correspondent for Radio-Canada, a reporter for CBC’s The National, and co-host of CBC’s The Fifth Estate. In 2015, after obtaining a Michener-Deacon Foundation Fellowship in Journalism Education, she began a new career as a professor of journalism at Concordia University.

Pelletier has a dozen documentary films to her name, including Public Enemy Number One (2003), on former Premier Jacques Parizeau; Sex, Truth and Videotape (2004), a six-part series on women and sex; Loto-Québec: La morale de l'argent (2015), an investigation on the provincial lottery; and Battle for Quebec's Soul (2022), an investigation on the evolution of Quebec’s nationalism.  Her 2023 book expands on the documentary with personal reflections. 

Experiential opportunities

Through her work as journalist in residence, Pelletier has engaged students in several experiential opportunities, including tours of the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, where students saw the inner workings of the cultural institution responsible for many groundbreaking films in Quebec and Canada. Students have also toured Prim facilities, an artist-run post-production studio dedicated to the research, experimentation and work of independent producers and film directors. It offers high-tech facilities at a lower cost and offers a stimulating, collaborative and diversified environment.

Pelletier also invited some students to shadow her on her own documentary shoots for her upcoming project on Quebec Solidaire’s Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in Gatineau and Trois-Rivières.

Documentary screenings

Pelletier has hosted on-site screenings as part of her mentorship with high-profile documentary filmmakers like Julian Sher, Sarah Spring, Martin Duckworth, David Gutnick and Félix Rose.