Caught stealing drugs from the wrong people, 27 year old Vincent is in trouble and on the run from the local mob. Fleeing to the backwoods, Vincent unexpectedly reconnects with his brother Michel with whom he’d cut ties many years ago. As he tries to maintain the semblance of a normal life hanging out with friends and playing in his band, Vincent witnesses his brother's own turbulent downward spiral.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

The Seven Last Words sounds out the experiential states and rituals particular to humanity, based on seven themes expressed in an oratorio: forgiveness, hope, relation, abandonment, distress, triumph, and life after the death.

Shot in super 8mm in Silo # 5 of the old port of Montreal in 2002, this film was achieved in 2011. Music by BJ Nilsen.

Exquisitely filmed in black-and-white, this experimental narrative follows four friends on a road trip as they discover the complicated arena of unseen desire that arises when ecstasy and sexuality mix.

Otherworldly frequencies and textured, fluctuating images beautifully visualize the distress of people who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and who must live in exile from cities in order to find solitude from the noise.

The Great Thaw is a project about permafrost thaw and how landscape is changed by it. We take a close look at ecosystems like the boreal forest, the tundra and the arctic coastline to document the impacts of the melting permafrost caused by climate change and to present the beauty of permafrost itself. After Antarctic Traces, The Great Thaw is a new part of the Ecological Grief Series which focuses on different aspects of human interaction with nature in the Anthropocene. The series investigates environmental melancholia and the loss of places, species and ecosystems. (directors' note)

All images and sounds of Unearthed were captured during a residency in the Arctic in Nikel, Zapolyarny and Prirechnyi in the Murmansk oblast in Russia, one of the most polluted areas in the world. True to his experimental cinema aesthetics, Karl Lemieux pursues his exploration of unusual locations as well as his long-term collaboration with musician and composer, BJ Nilsen. Unearthed is based on a work commissioned for the project Dark Ecology (2014−2017) curated by Sonic Acts and Hilde Methi.

Shot on 16mm film, this piece creatively portrays the making of Creation Destruction, a multidisciplinary outdoor performance by choreographer Dana Gingras set to music by the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. A cinematic capsule that is an ode to instability and collective resiliency.

An abstract representation of an erotic relationship.

Karl Lemieux deconstructs the narrative thread of found footage by slowing down its playback speed to the point of distortion. Music: Félix-Antoine Morin.

This version is a pre-cut or study of the original video material, which was used to make the 35mm CinémaScope vertical film of the same name.

A video vignette marking the 50th anniversary of the artist-run centre Le Vidéographe

On March 27, 2021, Godspeed You! Black Emperor invited fans to a virtual album event, officially presenting its concert film projections for the first time in the band’s 25-year history. GY!BE filmmakers/projectionists Karl Lemieux and Philippe Leonard set up their six 16 mm analog projectors in an empty Cinema Imperial, in Montréal, spooling dozens of film loops and short reels for a hallmark Godspeed concert experience, set to the band’s new recording.

Over the last 25 years, the Montreal post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has released seven albums and presented visually extraordinary shows around the world. At State’s End is their latest show, captured at the majestic Cinéma Impérial. It features six 16 mm projectors playing images in a loop to accompany the music from the band’s latest album. Part documentary, part experimental film, At State’s End! is a unique auditory and visual experience.

During the winter of 2015 Karl Lemieux travelled to China with BJ Nilsen and a small camera crew to make a piece about the country's infamous ghost cities. The work presented is made with images shot in the city of Yujiapu, near Tianjin where ancestral fishing villages have been destroyed to make way for a multibillion-dollar real estate project that was to become the new financial district of the area. The entire city was developed but never finished and has been left uninhabited for over six years. The film uses the lines and frames of the buildings of Yujiapu and the lines and the frames of the film strip to create abstract elements that slowly reveal an incredible desolate urban landscape.

Hand-painted film on 16mm by Karl Lemieux. Music by Visions.

Experimental work detailing the movements of crowds in an urban context, where the movement is both charged and fluid. Result of a series of long exposure experiments carried out on 16mm film with the director of photography.