Born in 1943 in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, Fernand Bélanger was an experimental filmmaker whose work often merged fiction, documentary and animation techniques. He directed seven NFB films between 1969 and 1985. 

His debut film was the 25-minute-long Ti-coeur (1969), produced through an NFB program for emerging artists called First Works (in French, Premières oeuvres). Combining fiction and documentary footage, this short begins as a road movie and ends up as a portrait of Montreal and its inhabitants. With a soundtrack composed/performed by Claude Hazanavicius, the film is a fascinating collaborative project that contains improvisation along with a troupe of actors playing different roles. 

Bélanger’s second film, Ty-Peupe (1971), is a feature-length drama about two young people looking for work who discover that the society they live in does not correspond to their values. Featuring actors interacting with everyday people in Montreal and improvised concerts and events, the film blurs the fine line between fiction and non-fiction cinema. Bélanger’s third film, the feature documentary De la tourbe et du restant (1979), co-directed by Louise Dugal and Yves Angrignon, is about the exploitation of the Bas-Saint-Laurent peatlands, which export the vast majority of their humus production to the US. The intertitles were directly painted/animated onto the film by hand, a technique that would enrich Bélanger’s later projects as well.

Bélanger made four films in the 1980s. L'Émotion dissonante (1984) is a feature-length doc on the drug phenomenon that centres on young people at risk, parents in dire need and social workers in schools. It also blends documentary and fiction, as well as youth theatre, interviews, collective creation and improvisation. Animation by Quebec auteur Pierre Hébert appears throughout the film. Co-directed by Angrignon and Dugal, L’Après-cours (1984), a companion short to the feature L'Émotion dissonante, focuses on young Montrealers’ testimonies about drugs. Love Addict (Offenbach) (1985), another offshoot of L'Émotion dissonante, is a sophisticated and beautiful homage to the legendary Quebec rock band and also offers the work of animation giant Hébert, who’s credited as co-director. The film was shown at nine film festivals in North America and Europe and was an official selection at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival. 

Passiflora (1985), co-directed by Dagmar Teufel, is a slow-paced, experimental portrait of Montreal’s “otherness” in 1984. Part documentary, part fiction, with animated sequences, the film could be split into two parts: day, when Pope John Paul II’s visit to the city is the predominant theme; and night, during which a Michael Jackson concert takes place. The filmmakers used the visits of these famous figures as springboards to capture the broad diversity of Montrealers, and not just the ones who went on a pilgrimage to see these two very different icons. Passiflora is also a portrait of the people in charge of building, organizing and producing the events—as well as those left out or not involved in either of them. In The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, scholar, critic and author Thomas Waugh wrote that “Passiflora may be the gayest film ever made in Canada,” and it has been the subject of several retrospectives in recent years.

Outside the NFB, Bélanger made two more films: Bandes-hommages 100 ans de cinéma (1996), co-directed with André Corriveau, François Gill and Hélène Girard, is a found-footage film made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of cinema, and it pays tribute to the creators and artists of Québecois cinema; and À voir Cuba (2005) depicts daily life in Cuba (though not an NFB production, the film received support from the NFB’s Filmmaker Assistance Program).

Fernand Bélanger passed away in 2006.