Documentaries
As a film-maker, my job is to tell stories. With documentaries, the characters with whom I tell these stories aren't professional actors, but extraordinary, everyday people who've generously agreed to let me share their lives for a while. What I love about this kind of film making is having the opportunity and above all the time to get to know people and places. The things I try to say and show in my documentary films are so often the result of all of the things I don't show: the hours spent talking, laughing, eating, arguing, wandering, wondering and pondering when the camera is turned off.
For two centimes more ...
For two centimes more … tells the story of La Coop des Masques, a cooperative factory set up in record time next to the western French city of Guingamp, to combat the deadly shortage of surgical masks at the outset of the pandemic. It's above all a human tale that questions the possibility of re-localising production, what companies could or should be about, the idea of the general good and how we want to live in the 'post-COVID' world.
(Les Films de traverse / Décpoupages / France3 Bretagne)
Wait&Sea, In Brexit's Troubled Waters
My name's Simon. I’m English and I’ve lived in Brittany, France for over 20 years with my French wife and our two kids. In June 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. Losing EU citizenship meant I'd also risk losing the automatic right to keep coming home to my family every evening. It felt like Brexit was ripping me in half. My friend and fellow director Antoine Tracou suggested we make a film together. But which film? What both unites and divides the UK and France? The sea of course. So we hitched a ride on a fishing boat in the Breton port of Guilvinec and headed across the Channel to Newlyn, in the UK county of Cornwall.
(France3 Bretagne/Aligal Production)
Great Britain, the Disunited Kingdom
In the months and weeks leading up to the 2016 referendum, Simon Coss visits two UK towns with two very different Brexit stories to tell. In each, he spends time with activists working in enemy territory. In Clacton-on-Sea, the Essex seaside resort with a reputation as the most anti-EU town in the country, he meets an intrepid band of committed europhiles. In Glasgow, the gritty former industrial heartland of staunchly pro-European Scotland, he gets to know Alastair and Karen, a businessman and an English teacher both desperate to throw off the yoke of Brussels' meddling bureaucrats.
24 Hours, English style
A high octane ride into the crazy world of a group of car-mad Brits who every year head to the same campsite in Le Mans, France to pitch up next the track of the mythical 24 Hours endurance race. For a weekend, the UK's arcane class codes are put on hold as wealthy Ferraris owners set up camp next to proudly working class factory mechanics.