Alain SAINT-HILAIRE Profile

Alain SAINT-HILAIRE is a long time adventure filmmaker whose life has taken him to some of the world’s most unusual and remote regions.

For 25 years, from 1964 to 1988, he roamed around the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and Iraq. He first went to the Persian Gulf in 1964 to film the last pearl divers before the uprising of the oil rich states. In 1969 he went back to this area, met with the rulers of those sheikhdoms and filmed a hunting party with falcons which appeared on channel 4 New York TV in “Strange World” Time-Life series. Right after the civil war, he lived for a year in Yemen. In Iraq he lived with the people of the marshes and filmed inside the holy shrines of Shia'a Islam. Desert lover he was in Chad in 1982 during the civil war and shot a film dedicated to the Tuareg population in Niger. Based in Montreal since 1983, he made a steep turn to visit the polar desert of the arctic.


His work has been released on many TV stations throughout the world. He was a guest star on Belgium, French and Switzerland televisions. His films have been released on European networks ( Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland), Canadian Broadcast Corporation (French network), Arab world TV etc,...
Black Gold Princes and Iraq have been aired on TV5. The mini serie : “ The Nature of Canada” has been broadcasted on Discovery US, Canada and UK. Since 1988 he has been working closely with talented award-winning California underwater filmmaker Adam Ravetch and Arctic Bear Productions 's President Sarah ROBERTSON. They developped projects for PBS Television, Canal + (Toothwalkers 1997, Arctic Oasis 2001) and National Geographic TV (Toothed Titans 1999).

“…Right after the second world war, my youth was flooded with adventurer’s lives : Henry de Monfreid, Joseph Kessel, Paul-Émile Victor, Théodore Monod, Captain Cousteau, Mermoz, Guillaumet, Saint-Exupéry…. Testimonies, episodes of lives in which I saw a step of free men..”

My images and documents are dedicated to human beings for a better knowledge and mutual understanding and the respect of different cultures necessaries to our own survival… I wish they could be a tie between the object and its surroundings, between man and his planet.

Despite a high technology changes, fertile imagination, indecent and aggressive richness, the vast majority of human beings have only their survival as a goal in their lives.

Stay humbles in front of nature and modests when facing history …

Memberships :
- member of the French Explorers Society
- senior member of Société des Gens de Lettres de France
- member of the Quebec Film Director’s Association
member of the International Association Islam & the West