Morgann Gicquel

I grew up with two important father figures, my father's video camera he often took home after reporting around the world for France 2, and the Jurassic Park toys from McDonald's Happy Meals I could found in kindergarten.

And through that you can see my entire life: the fascination of small monsters you could transform in ordinary shapes and this huge device, more than half my size, which could record everything I saw.

When I was 11, I got 'Lego Studio' a Lego movie set with its own mini-camera and mini-editing software. All my stop-motion learning come from here as I worked on a set cut out for my size.

Every morning before going to school, at the age of 13, I watched a film. I got up two hours before the classes began and before getting some instruction, I educated myself with Polanski, Spielberg, Weir, Kubrick, Lynch - to name but a few - for more than four years.

14 years old: I film everything. My friends, my dog, my parents, the sea, the sky, the moon, legos... I begin to build my own short-stories with my friends and what comes handy. In eight grade I co-direct with three classmates a 14minutes documentary about the Shoah.

I went for a scientific high school diploma. But, even though I have a real fascination for science, my grades doesn't hold up. I try to make up for my non-scholar mind in going regularly to a film workshop where we experiment video art. With the firm intention of doing things my way, and while discovering Kubrick's cinema, I decide to make a 50minutes film with some classmate and my own equipment. We then set up a paying screening which attracted some 150 viewers.

I did it again in twelfth grade with a second 50minute long film, the same year I would pass my high school diploma in science (baccalauréat S). The film, called Baccalauréat, is about the insecurities and self-estime issues with teenagers and got an article in the french magazine Marianne.

My high school diploma in hands, I went to Paris VIII university to follow a bachelor in philosophy with a minor on film studies. As I always dreamt of an open education in a humanist way, I certainly got what I wanted.

During the summer with my old high school classmates, we create a film society to help teenagers between the ages of 15 and 25 to make films, animations and music (in direct relation with cinema). I'm appointed president.

During the second semester of my first college year I became politicly engaged in a strike against french law LRU which could result to ending such curriculum as philosophy & cinema. I direct lots of short reports and experimental short-features mostly with "la Ronde Infinie des Obstiné(e)s" a teacher's movement that lasted for three month.

That's how, at the age of 21, on my third college year, as I directed ten short-films and lots of other videos, I came to give a semestrial course in Paris VIII about the question I always asked myself: what is cinema?

Now that I am 24, 20 short-films behind me, a second film societyn created about experimenting in fiction, and moving to Brooklyn to study filmmaking, I strive for becoming part of an established production company, and finally direct professional features with people as passionate about film as I always have been.