MONTREAL — Filmmaker Léa Pool (Lost and Delirious) is making another film about youth, the coming-of-age movie Ma mère est chez le coiffeur (My Mother Is at the Hairdresser’s). The $4.3-million feature, which began shooting July 16 and wraps Aug. 31, involves the story of one adolescent girl who experiences a bittersweet summer when her mother goes away to work. Left to fend for herself, the girl has her first romance and spends an innocent season with her friends in rural Quebec. Written by Isabelle Hébert, the film is set in the ’60s and is steeped in nostalgia.

‘We knew that Léa was the right person to do this,’ says coproducer Lyse Lafontaine. ‘We developed this script together. She was giving us feedback from the beginning, when the script first got funding from Telefilm. She has done such wonderful work with young actors, from Lost and Delirious to The Blue Butterfly, we thought she was a very natural choice for this film.’

Lafontaine says the lengthy shoot time is due to the fact that shooting days are restricted to nine hours. ‘We have a lot of child actors in the cast, so our days are shorter, that’s why we’re taking it to the end of August.’

Lafontaine adds that the script is both nostalgic and forward-thinking at once. ‘The film looks back to a time when children could go out and play in a field and their parents wouldn’t be worried. But the family is also dealing with the aftermath of a divorce, and back then, divorce was much, much more rare.’

Lafontaine (Un dimanche à Kigali) specializes in making smaller, personal films — but don’t look to her to trash Quebec’s brasher, bolder action movies. ‘I loved Nitro. There’s room for all kinds of cinema in Quebec. We need those movies, like Nitro and Bon Cop, Bad Cop, to bring people into the cinemas. They will come for the smaller more personal films, but they also need the bigger ones, too. You have to give them different movies, it can’t all just be about a family sitting around a kitchen.’

The central role in Ma mère est chez le coiffeur is played by Marianne Fortier, and the cast includes Céline Bonnier, Gabriel Arcand and Laurent Lucas. Shot by cinematographer Daniel Jobin and edited by Dominique Fortin, the film is produced by Lafontaine and Michael Mosca of Equinoxe Productions, with the assistance of Telefilm Canada and SODEC. The film will be distributed by Equinoxe Films next year.

Pool has emerged as one of the most outspoken filmmakers in the Quebec milieu. In March, she signed a public letter along with other women in the Quebec film business arguing that the province’s women were not getting their fair share of government funding to the industry. ‘We are sounding the alarm bell,’ Pool said at the time. ‘Something is wrong.’ The public letter, which was published in both French-language dailies, La Presse and Le Devoir, pointed out that while a quarter of the films in Quebec were directed by women, these same films only got 14% of the funding.