Brault returned to Quebec and the NFB, but quit the Board in 1965 when Pierre Juneau, the director of French production, refused to okay his first fiction feature, "Entre la mer et l'eau douce". Since he pursued a very successful freelance career in feature films, documentaries, shorts and television. His cinematography ranged from the gritty cinéma-vérité style of "À tout prendre" to the lyricism of "Kamouraska", and his directorial work from the terse documentary stylings of "La lutte" to smoothly proficient television dramas such as "Les noces de papier", which was entered into the 40th Berlin International Film Festival. He won Canadian Film Awards for lensing "Mon oncle Antoine" and "The Time of the Hunt (Le Temps d’une chasse)", and Genie Awards for his work on "Good Riddance (Les Bons débarras)" and "Threshold". "Orders (Les Ordres)" (1974), which he directed, shot and wrote, won for him the CFA for direction and he shared the best director award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. The film seamlessly fuses documentary and fiction styles while dramatizing the trauma of innocent people caught up in the October Crisis of 1970. It is still regarded as a masterpiece of Canadian cinema.