Denys Arcand is a Canadian director, screenwriter, and producer, born in Deschambault, Quebec, in 1941. After beginning his career in the 1960s with documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada, he established himself in fiction film, becoming one of the most important voices in Quebec cinema. His international fame is primarily linked to a thematic trilogy about contemporary society and its disillusions. The first installment, *The Decline of the American Empire* (1986), earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, an achievement repeated by *Jesus of Montreal* (1989), which also won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The pinnacle of his success came with *The Barbarian Invasions* (2003), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the awards for Best Screenplay and Best Actress at Cannes. Characterized by witty dialogue and sharp social satire, his cinema explores themes such as friendship, mortality, and the crisis of Western values, as seen in later works such as *The Fall of the American Empire* (2018).