Born in Quebec City in 1974 and raised in Saguenay, Quebec, Patrick Bouchard earned an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, where he directed his first stop-motion puppet film, Jean Leviériste (1998), as part of his degree. His first professional film, The Brainwashers (2002), a comic but chilling look at a musician tormented by his overactive imagination, won a Jutra Award for best animated short. Dehors novembre (2005), based on a song by the Quebec rock group Les Colocs, also received a Jutra and was screened in competition at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Bouchard followed up with his third stop-motion puppet film, Subservience (2007), which depicts a world on the verge of collapse thanks to its callous bourgeoisie and submissive servants. In 2007, at the Off-Courts Festival in Trouville, France, he made Talon d’argile, a very short film with constantly mutating clay figures, in just 24 hours. This experiment inspired Bydlo (2012), which was selected to screen at both TIFF and Annecy and went on to win Bouchard’s third Jutra in 2013. The film received awards at several other film festivals, notably the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, where it won the award for best animated film, and the Fantasia International Film Festival, where it won the Special Award for Technical Achievement. Le sujet is his fifth film with the NFB.