Laurent Chevallier

Laurent Chevallier was born on June 6, 1955. His cinema studies in Paris were oriented from the start towards documentary since he wrote a memoir on the “father” of documentary film, Robert Flaherty (Nanouk l’esquimau, L’Homme d’Aran), and on Joris Ivens (who shot his last film, A Story of Wind, in China at the age of ninety with the presence of Laurent Chevallier on camera).
After his studies, he was an assistant cameraman or director of photography for numerous directors (Jean-Jacques Beineix, Jacques Rouffio, René Allio, Gérard Mordillat, Patrice Leconte, Gérard Oury).
From 1979, he made numerous documentaries for television in France, at Cape Horn, in the Himalayas, at the North Pole, in Patagonia, in Thailand, in Italy, in Ireland, in Pakistan, in China, in Canada, in the USA, Australia, Uganda and Guinea.
In 1989, he directed his first feature film on the Antarctic continent, Au Sud du Sud, dedicated to the crossing of the Antarctic by Jean-Louis Étienne.
In 1990, Djembefola, his first African film, took him to Guinea Conakry, a country which would strongly attract him to the point of subsequently directing L’Enfant noir (1995 – adapted from the novel by Camara Laye, and selected for the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival), Circus Baobab (2000), Hadja Moï (2005), Momo the Dean (2006), African Experience (2008), The Trace of Kandia (2014).
Among his Guinean films, he devotes pride of place to Morocco (La Vie sans Brahim in 2001, La Pépinière du Desert in 2008).
Several of his works have been selected and awarded prizes at international festivals.
Originally from the Grenoble region, Laurent Chevallier is an experienced skier and mountaineer. He also acts as an occasional training instructor in shooting and documentary at La Fémis (France), at the Master 2 in creative documentary filmmaking at Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis (Senegal) and at the Imagine institute in Ouagadougou (Burkina). Faso).
Source: film-documentaire.fr