Born in Montreal in 1961, Sylvain L'Espérance studied visual arts and cinema. Over the past 25 years, he has travelled a path that has taken him from Quebec to Mali to Greece, making a dozen films that combine direct cinema and experimental research in a poetic exploration of reality. The place that foreigners and marginalized communities occupy in our world is at the heart of the concerns of each of his films. Migrants, workers, artisans, sailors, fishermen, shepherds, unemployed people, homeless people, these are the common people who speak and act there. Through the street theater, song and poetry that they practice, his films reveal a political and free speech inhabited by a raw and indomitable force. Selected and awarded at major documentary festivals, L'Espérance's films now have an international reputation. Delta Interiors received the Prize for Best Direction at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence (2010) and On the World Shore the Grand Prix in the international competition at the Dok.fest in Munich (2013). Combat at the end of the night was presented in the Panorama section of the Berlinale (2017).

Marie-Claude Loiselle continues to write an exploratory work that combines aesthetic, philosophical and poetic questions, proposing a new vision of cinema in its relationship to the world. She was a screenwriting consultant and independent curator after having served for many years as editor-in-chief of the magazine 24 images. A collaborator for fifteen years in writing and editing Sylvain L'Espérance's films, Le chant d'Empédocle is the first film they signed together.