François Caillat

François Caillat, born 1951, spent his childhood in Lorraine.

In Paris, during his school years, he was introduced to the theater (studying dramatic art with François Florent; creating a high school troupe after May 68; participating in the collective experiments of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil in the early 1970s).
He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS St-Cloud) and became graduate of philosophy (agrégé de philosophie) in 1975.
He taught philosophy for a few years, then finally turned to cinema. He trained by shooting several short fiction films and musical films, before tackling feature films.

For the past twenty years, François Caillat has been making films on the border between documentary and essay. He is interested in representations of the past, traces, absence and oblivion. He defends the concept of a “documentary novel”, which favors the staging and the personal narrative.

Welcome to Bataville and Of Youth and Love are two theatrical films.
The Fourth Generation,  Valérie’s case, Three German Soldiers, Médecins de brousse and The Listener are feature films produced for the Arte channel (La Lucarne or Grand Format).

Most recently, Hope, letters on Engagement (2017) is an epistolary film with two voices directed with Silvia Radelli.
Russian Triptych (2018) is a feature film.

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The Fourth Generation: Set in the french region of Lorraine, François Caillat’s film explores multiple generations of timber workers and the strange territorial destinity surrounding Lorraine.

Three German Soldiers: François Caillat’s film begins with a macabre event-the exhumation of an unknown soldier’s corpse on Caillat’s family estate.

Valerie’s case: A film-maker travels through mountain villages and along the shores of Alpine lakes to investigate the disappearance of Valérie 20 years earlier.

 Welcome to Bataville: Tomas Bata, the man whose dream it was to shoe humanity, conducted a daring economic and social experiment in 1932 when he set up a model community around one of his shoe factories in the Lorraine region of France.

 Of Youth and Love: Caillat’s film is headlong, head-over-heels initiation into the swirl of love and life, following our Parisian narrator as he navigates an amorous coming-of-age in the 1970’.

Russian Triptych: François Caillat explores the tragic construction of the Belomorkanal, the first major project in the Soviet Union conducted using the forced labour of gulag immates.

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FRANÇOIS CAILLAT, with a background in philosophy, comes from the reverse tradition -a literary and cinematic one. Like Alain Cavalier, Caillat is above all a storyteller- a ghost hunter interested in romance and memory. In his Sebald-like novelistic essays, he proves to be a virtuoso in the poetic evocation of the past through sounds, images, old documents and landscapes.

His brilliant debut film La Quatrième géneration (The Fourth Generation) recalls the rise and fall of his own family dynasty of lumber barons in Lorraine, digging through a century of secrets and mysteries.
In Trois soldats allemands (Three German Soldiers), Caillat investigates the life of three soldiers who died in Lorraine under the German uniform, telling in the process the whole history of the French province which was annexed by Germany from 1870 to 1918 and returned to France, only to become German once again during the Second World War. Both films are mesmerizing tales of haunted places and their history.
In narrating his own love affairs from his teenage years into his early thirties in Une jeunesse amoureuse (Of Youth and Love), François Caillat draws a kind of « Carte du Tendre, » an amorous geography of Paris shot in different picturesque neighbourhoods, portraying at the same time a generation coming of age in the 70s.
Caillat’s latest movie, Triptyque russe (Russian Triptych), revisits the epic and tragic history of the construction of the Belomorkanal, connecting Baltic and White Seas, during which 20,000 gulag prisoners and forced labourers perished under Stalin’s rule. The film features Russian historian Yury Dmitriev, an active member of the recently dissolved Memorial NGO, who relentlessly searched and dug up the mass graves in Karelia to reveal this hidden memory of Stalinism

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FRANÇOIS CAILLAT, GHOST CHASER

by Thierry Garrel
producer and program planer

In what is now conventionally called the “Ecole Française du documentaire”   (french manner of documentaries), François Caillat has an at once special and secret place.

As a storyteller and poet, ghost hunter and one who tells good adventure yarns, for twenty years he has been developing a most coherent oeuvre, elegantly—and with the sleight of hand of a conjurer—weaving enchanting tales, full of imagery, to help us share the fruit of his solitary expeditions into the depths of the past.

If François Caillat knows, like nobody else, how to use powers of evocation and suggestion, where images and sounds are concerned (impressions and super-impressions), grasp the spirit of places, and cast upon characters and landscapes alike, as well the documents and objects of reality, a very keen eye, it is always the novelistic elements which hold sway in his films: local or national imagination, novel of childhood or adolescence, family novel.

This is why François Caillat, in the very way in which he daringly and musically handles the language of images and the subtle tricks of narrative, is probably the most sebald-like of today’s documentary makers.

Thierry Garrel has headed the Arte TV documentary unit since it was created in 1992. Recognizing him as a pillar of television documentary policy, the Galerie du Jeu de Paume held a retrospective of his work as a producer in 2011. He is now producer and program planer. He is in charge of international documentary festival of Vancouver DOXA.

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FRANÇOIS CAILLAT, DIRECTOR OF THE ABSENCE

by Patricio Guzmán
filmaker

One could say that François Caillat is a filmmaker of words, because without a doubt a significant part of his documentary work relies on the narrator’s voice, the voice over. There is a way of telling, recounting or describing facts, which compose “Caillat’s style” and are the base in which he builds his documentary structure. His work could not be understood without that voice that portrays the real development.

However, where do these voices rest ? Over what images does François Caillat talk ? Here’s one of the surprises of this author’s language. Caillat talks about death while we see a forest in the evening. He talk about money as we see a water tank. He talks about the world war while we see a bird in flight. He hardly ever talks about what we are seeing on screen. However, behind these images that have no apparent relation to the text, we begin to visualize the story that that’s being told, in other words, we begin to see what is not visible…

We still haven’t revealed François Caillat’s other secret. This singular director introduces us to the world of 8mm. Caillat use long fragment of 8mm footage filmed by him. These are fugitive, unexpected vision that reach us like gusts of wind : fallen tress, church towers, railroads, smoke stacks, silent rivers. These images often appear without the original sound, they come folded in subtle gust of wind, or with minimalist and mysterious barely audible music, that takes us to an alternate reality. The hazy texture of 8mm footage, its lake of definition, its waftyness and weightlessness open the door towards a documentary fantasy.

The third secret is that he shoots, on some occasions, twice. He screens on his home walls the 8mm footage and shoots it over with a video camera, with multiplies the 8mm film texture. In other words he fabricates his own “file” on his home walls. With the second time framing. Caillat turns the 8mm in a dreamy platform, of footage that seems to come from a different era. Thit without mentioning the editing, which he deepens in each film, seen in the magic of the association between nature and human beings he offers unsuspectedly.