In 1967, Anne Claire Poirier became the first woman to direct a feature film in Quebec, De mere en fille, a work that turned the private experience of pregnancy and motherhood into cinema at a National Film Board where every director's chair had, until then, been filled by a man. Poirier died in her sleep at her home in Outremont, Quebec, in late September 2026, at the age of 94. Her son, Frederic Cornu, confirmed her death, and the National Film Board announced it the same week.

She was born June 6, 1932, in Saint-Hyacinthe. She studied law and trained at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique, then worked at Radio-Canada as an actress, script assistant and program host, including on the show Carrefour, before joining the National Film Board in 1960 as an assistant director and editor. Her first chance to direct came in 1963, with a short film about actor Christopher Plummer made at producer Jacques Bobet's invitation. A year later she wrote and directed La Fin des etes, working from a script she co-wrote with novelist Hubert Aquin and starring a young Genevieve Bujold as a woman consumed by her devotion to a disabled brother.

For most of the 1960s and 1970s, Poirier was the only woman directing films at the National Film Board. De mere en fille, built from a journal she kept during a real pregnancy, treated maternity as the subject of serious cinema rather than its backdrop. She did not stop at making her own films. In 1972 she initiated and produced En tant que femmes, an NFB program that gave women filmmakers an organized platform for the first time, commissioning work on daycare, aging and, in her own Le Temps de l'avant (1975), the decision to end an unplanned pregnancy. Les Filles du Roy (1974), also part of the series, set the historical figures of the filles du roi and the accused witch La Corriveau against the modern working mother, asking what had actually changed.

Her best-known film went further still. Mourir a tue-tete (1979) fused fiction and documentary to confront rape and the way courts and hospitals treated the women who reported it. The Festival de Cannes selected it for its Un Certain Regard section that year, and Canada submitted it for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. According to the citation later written for her Governor General's Performing Arts Award, a television broadcast of the film reached roughly two million Canadian viewers, and the jury praised her body of work as political cinema made from a woman's point of view, engaged in the most significant liberation movement of her time.

Poirier kept working through the 1980s, directing La Quarantaine (1982), about a group of old friends confronting middle age, and the television film Salut Victor! (1988), about an unlikely friendship between two men in a seniors' residence. In October 1992, her daughter Yanne was killed at 26; the National Film Board's own catalogue records that Yanne had struggled with addiction before her death. Four years later, Poirier made Tu as crie: Let Me Go (1996), her final film for the National Film Board, working from narration text co-written with novelist Marie-Claire Blais. It turned her family's loss into a documentary inquiry on addiction, sex work and violence against women, and won the Genie Award for best feature-length documentary. She left the National Film Board the following year, after roughly four decades there.

Quebec and Canada recognized her across those decades and after. She was named a Chevaliere of the Ordre national du Quebec in the order's inaugural class in 1985 and promoted to Officiere in 2008. She received the Prix Albert-Tessier, Quebec's top cinema honor, on October 17, 1988, the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 2001 and a Jutra Hommage in 2002. In 2003 she was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada, with a citation crediting her with launching feminist cinema in Quebec across more than 35 years at the National Film Board.

Suzanne Guevremont, the National Film Board's current president and Government Film Commissioner, said on news of her death that Poirier 'a ete une veritable pionniere, ouvrant la voie aux cineastes quebecoises et au cinema feministe' (was a true pioneer, opening the way for Quebec's women filmmakers and feminist cinema). Her son, Frederic Cornu, put it more simply: 'Ma mere etait une fonceuse, une grande femme qui est sortie des tranchees et qui a donne aux femmes leur place au cinema' (my mother was a go-getter, a formidable woman who came up through the trenches and gave women their place in cinema).

Poirier's imprint is concrete. De mere en fille and Mourir a tue-tete put pregnancy, motherhood and rape on Quebec screens when few other directors would go near them. En tant que femmes put other women behind National Film Board cameras for the first time. And Tu as crie: Let Me Go turned her own family's grief into a public reckoning rather than a private silence. Quebec cinema's willingness to look directly at what it would rather not discuss owes a debt to the pictures she insisted on making.