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Léa Pool

The daughter of a Polish Holocaust-survivor father and a Swiss mother, filmmaker Léa Pool was born in 1950, in Soglio, Switzerland, and raised in Lausanne. Pool's first work was a short documentary in 1978. The film was called "Laurent Lamerre, Porter," and explored the work and personal experiences of Laurent Lamerre, a porter at the Champlain Hotel in Montreal. In 1988 her film "A corps perdu" was selected for competition at the Venice Film Festival. The film told the story of Pierre, a photojournalist sent to Nicaragua to cover the conflict there. After capturing many disturbing images, he returns to Canada to find that his two romantic partners have abandoned their ménage a trois. Alone and untethered, Pierre is forced to forge a new life for himself. As a lesbian, Pool has explored themes of human sexuality in many of her films, including "Set Me Free" (1999), "Lost and Delirious" (2001), and "Mommy is at the Hairdresser's" (2008). In 2011 Pool presented her documentary "Pink Ribbons, Inc.," which was a National Film Board of Canada project about the pink ribbon campaign to cure breast cancer. The film explores instances where certain companies use the pink-ribbon marketing technique to increase their sales figures and improve their public image while still manufacturing products with known carcinogens. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival.