In the past ten years, François Caillat has
produced documentary films about absence, the traces of memory and the
influence of the past on our daily lives. A number of long length films about these themes were made
for the TV channel Arte; among them are La Quatrième génération, a saga about his family, Trois soldats allemands, a historical
fiction about a man who disappeared during WW2; and L’Affaire Valérie, an investigation on the collective memory of a
trivial news event.
Bienvenue à Bataville, a fable about the necessity of
happiness in the 20th century was released in the cinema in November
2008.
Occasionally,
his university degree in philosophy leads him to treat more theoretical subjects
in the domain of neurological cognitive sciences as in L’Homme qui écoute (The Man Who Listens) and Naissance de la parole (Birth of Speech). He has also produced film portraits of intellectuals and
writers; e.g. Peter Sloterdijk, A
German philosopher and Julia Kristeva,
étrange étrangère (Strange stranger) or more recently, J.M.G. Le Clézio, entre les mondes (Between the Worlds).
Apart from
his work as a filmmaker, François Caillat is involved with a number of other
activities related to documentary cinema:
He directs the
collection Cinéma documentaire, a
publication of debates, critical texts and screenplays for the publisher L’Harmattan. His most recent work is: Le style dans le cinema documentaire (The
Style of Documentary Cinema), 2007.
He is one
of the co-founders of the collectif
Gulliver that specializes in the promotion of French and foreign
documentary films; the director of the Association
Documentaire sur Grand Ecran (Association of Documentary Films on the Big
Screen), the member and ex-president of Addoc, an association of documentary makers, and an ex-member of the Commission Télévision, the jury Brouillon d’un rêve and the board of
administration of the SCAM.
He gives
regular lectures at the documentary department of the FEMIS, the Images en
Bibliothèque, the CNC etc., where
he presents his own documentaries and pilot films or gives advice on the
writing of screenplays.
