Elise Picon

Artist

Elise studied at the Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, at the École nationale d’art de Paris-Cergy and at the Atelier Documentaire de la FEMIS. She’s a film editor (Le Gavatx by Lorenz Findeisen, La vie rêvée des œuvres by Stan Neumann…), a film director (Un Mur au Sahara, Périmètres sensibles, Ici et là-bas…). She also organises workshops, formations and produces documentary podcasts for national radios such as Arte Radio, France Culture and RFI. In 2017, she developed a collaborative project in Noisy-le-Sec, and she was awarded a writing grant from Region Ile de France for her documentary project Les Monts gardés.

Anna Belguermi

Artist

Anna Belguermi has studied at the Sorbonne, the Fémis and the École nationale d’arts de Paris-Cergy. She co-writes with other film-makers and works on her own films. She directed the short film Ulysse doit partir and is currently working on her first feature film. She has worked with Belladone on workshops centred around the creation of radios in middle-schools and in a foster farm for female convicts.

Julie Biro

Director

Since 2014, Julie has produced documentaries and worked on different audio-visual projects. Julie likes to dive deep into her projects in order to enter the world of the people involved in them. Coming from a multicultural background, she feels most at ease at this intersection between cultures and identities. As a History graduate, she worked in different non-profit organisations for twenty years. This experience has led her to understand the frailty of things.

Max

Artist

In my work, I’m known as Max. I make films and write novels.

I am currently working on two major projects: a movie produced by New Shoes Productions, called J’affronterai la nuit (which is laureate for the Bourse Brouillon d’un rêve documentaire by the SCAM), and on my novel called Les Audacieux Modes d’Emploi d’une Triste Idiote.

I am currently teaching photography and video at the École de Design et d’architecture Camondo. For the last few years, I have built an art residency with the composer Antonio Giaffreda : QENHUN (questo_esercizio_non_ha_un_nome) in Parabita, in the Puglia region in the South of Italy. In August 2023, the residency will open a political film festival of work in progress: QUESTOfest. I am the art director for this festival.

I received a classical education: I went to the Beaux-Arts, to a prep school, a conservatory and did a master’s degree. I spent my childhood between the Parisian suburbs and Eastern Europe (thanks to my father’s work). I was raised in a fusion of theatre, rap, novels and English boxing. My mother is Indian, my father is Russian and I have a deep fondness for South America.

I love working on everyday life, the spoken tongue, the complexities of working with others and physical activity. These issues are at the centre of my artistic process, which is somewhere between fiction and documentary.

My work is built on the collaboration with the people around me as well as the public. My creative process could be summed up by this quote by Maurice Pialat: « If I tell you how to do something, you will do what I tell you to. And if you do what I tell you to, it won’t make any sense. You are the one that must make things ».

I think that my process could be qualified as a « humanist » one, in the Renaissance sense of the word. I am interested in seeing and representing the entirety of the world, as a social and political construct. In my work, I try to shed light on how it feels to be in a certain place at a certain time, and on what one might think and live in these circumstances: why is it that way? How else could it be?

Thomas Guillaud-Bataille

Artist

Sound creator by formation, Thomas Guillaud-Bataille works for radio stations such as France Culture and ARTE Radio. He also organises workshops on sound design and podcasts. Thomas Guillaud-Bataille’s approach to sound design is both experimental and educational. He explores every genre audio creation has to offer with curiosity, from auto-fiction to news report, field recoding and documentary. He works with sounds from everyday life, trying to capture life as it sounds or as we perceive it. He directed radio creations for France Culture, le Mouv’ and ARTE Radio. He is the supervisor of a platform for the latter, the « Audioblogs » (http://audioblog.arteradio.com/).  Thomas Guillaud-Bataille also hosts pedagogical workshops for students.

Julie Bonan

Artist

After studying acting at the Cours Florent, Julie Bonan did a master’s degree in cinema and audio-visual arts at Paris VIII University before graduating in 2001 from the Fémis (directing section).

Aside from her work as casting director for directors such as Noémie Lvovsky, Cédric Khan, Jacques Maillot, Hélène Fillières or Frédéric Videau, Julie Bonan’s short films Entre 4 murs and Fille Unique were selected in several festivals in Clermond Ferrand, Brest, Pantin and Munich, and were broadcasted on France 3 and ARTE. She produced La Leçon du Cinéma d’Agnes Varda in Cannes and Il était une fois… Les Enfants du Paradis, which was shown at the 62^nd festival de Cannes before being made part of the exhibition on Marcel Carné at the French Cinémathèque.

As well as being an actress in the movie Variété Française selected at the Mostra de Venise in 2003, Julie Bonan directed a number of documentaries for ARTE (l’art et la manière, Cut up, Visages d’Europe, Arte web), France 3, France 5, la chaîne histoire or Paris Première, that cover a vast number of subjects such as blindness, hip hop, sound effect design, academic failure, public schooling (Ma France à moi, 70 mn, published on DVD at l’Harmattan), phobias, ruffians or public personas such as Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (52mn), Hervé Bourges (2X52mn), Jacqueline de Romilly (2X52mn), Pierre André-Boutang (2X52mn), Ernest Pignon-Ernest (26mn), Henri Cueco (26mn), Mode 2 (26mn), Speedy Graphito (26mn), Florent Marchet (26mn) or shorter pieces on writers such as André Brink, Lyonel Trouillot, Macha Makeïeff, Cécile Ladjali and Henri Bauchau.

She just finished a documentary series called Mes Copines ont du style (10x6mn) broadcasted on France-Télévision/Outremers which portrays women. She is currently working on a documentary on Salvador Puig Antich and preparing a documentary on a theatre company in Corsica. Her last documentary to date « Les Jours d’après » (68mn) tells the exile of three migrants.

Apart from the film workshops she leads in Parisian suburbs, she teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis Lumière, at the University de Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and in high schools for the French Cinémathèque and the Maison du geste et de l’image.

Guillaume Levil

Artist

Guillaume Levil has written and directed several short films and feature films that travelled around the world, such as Une lettre ne s’écrit pas, released in April 2014, and Le Problème du pantalon, a documentary broadcasted on France 3. Among his short films, he directed Arthur Rambo and written Fils (laureate for the « César Luxembourgeois »), that were selected by 95 and 160 festivals respectively.