François Caillat

François Caillat 
Documentary Film Directing | B
Visiting Lecturer (2013)

François Caillat has been making films for some fifteen years, dealing with absence and oblivion, traces, and more broadly the perceptible incorporation of the past in our daily round.

His feature films have been made for television (Arte France) and form a kind of trilogy on the themes of memory and landscape: La Quatrième Génération (1997), Trois Soldats Allemands (2001) and L’Affaire Valérie (2004). The latest film, made for the cinema, Une Jeunesse Amoureuse (released in 2013), is an autobiographical film set in Paris in the 1970s.

François Caillat had already made a feature film (released in 2008), Bienvenue à Bataville, a fable about obligatory happiness in the 20th century. For television he has also produced portraits of intellectuals and writers: Peter Sloterdijk, un philosophe allemand; and Julia Kristeva, étrange étrangère; and latterly J.M.G. Le Clézio, entre les mondes.

In addition to filmmaking, François Caillat is involved in activities associated with documentary cinema. He runs the Cinéma documentaire collection (publication of discussions, critical texts and scripts) at the publisher L’Harmattan (forthcoming: Le temps dans le cinéma documentaire, 2011). He is a member of the Gulliver collective, whose brief is the promotion of French and foreign documentaries, the Association des Cinéastes Documentaristes ADDOC, and Documentaire Sur Grand Ecran. 

He regularly visits institutions and schools to present his work, and to assist with films and screenplays.