Santiago Bertolino is an independent director-screenwriter and web video journalist whose latest work is Freelancer on the Front Lines, an NFB-produced feature documentary. After graduating from Brébeuf College in 1998 with a diploma in creative arts, literature and languages, and a focus on cinema, Santiago Bertolino learned the craft of filmmaking mostly on the job while taking technical courses over several years. A strong believer in documentaries that question the mass media and the images they produce, he soon began to take on political projects in which he could share his vision of the state of the world. His first films—Les illusions du libre-échange, co-directed with Sylvain Bédard (2001), and La crise du café (2002) and Nuevo Horizonte (2005), two shorts about Guatemala and co-ops—are good examples. Although Bertolino is a global citizen, he has a keen interest in how Quebec society is evolving, as seen in several of his web projects: Actualité citoyenne (2006–2009) and Trucs et astuces de la vidéo citoyenne (2008), available on the NFB site under the Parole citoyenne program, or the De prison en prison vlog (2010) co-directed with Steve Patry, a series of shorts about ex-convicts re-entering society. In 2013, Bertolino teamed up with Hugo Samson to direct Red Square on a Blackboard, a vibrant documentary on the “maple spring,” the student demos of 2012 supporting free tuition in Quebec. The film won two Gémeaux awards in 2014 (best social documentary and best documentary script). His interest in the conflicts in the Middle East, and especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, led him to make several shorts in the region: La marche pour la libération de Gaza ou le tourbillon égyptien and Seules, les pierres n’arrêteront pas l’occupation, co-directed with Steve Patry. In 2013–2014, he co-wrote the documentary feature Pipelines, Power and Democracy with the film’s director, Olivier D. Asselin. The film looks at political and citizen engagement on environmental issues related to the development and exports of oil from the Alberta oil sands.
