Catherine Hébert
After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Communication at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Catherine Hébert entered the graduate program in international journalism offered jointly by Université Laval and the École supérieure de journalisme in Lille, France. She then did an apprenticeship at RTBF, the Belgian public broadcaster, and worked as a cooperant in Senegal.
On returning to Montréal, she was hired as a researcher and assistant director for the documentary War Babies, about children born of war rape. In 2002, she began directing news reports for Points Chauds, an international news program broadcast on Télé-Québec. Her first documentary, Tea at the Embassy, describes the struggle of an 80-year-old activist and former prisoner of war in the Japanese concentration camps.
In spring 2004, she filmed a news report on one of today’s most under-reported conflicts, the war that rages in northern Uganda; Mangos for Charlotte was broadcast the following autumn on Télé-Québec. In 2005, she shoots her first lenght documentary, He’s the Man, a portrait of an heterogeneous company that plays the life of Jesus. Her most recent report, The Face I once Had, looks at acid attacks on women in Bangladesh. It won Best News Report at the 2006 Gémeaux Award, honouring French-language achievement in Canadian television.
Moved by what she saw during her stay in Uganda, Catherine Hébert returned for three months, during which she filmed the feature documentary The Other Side of the Country.