Birthday:
03-29-1957
(67 years)
Birthplace:
Paris, France
Biography
François Margolin, born on the 29th of March 1957, alumnus from FEMIS (French National Film School), combines the hats of writer, director and producer. He directed Mensonge in 1994, with Nathalie Baye, The Opium of the Talibans in 2001 and Les Petits Soldats (about Child Soldiers in Liberia) in 2005. His first short movie, Elle et Lui, won the famous Jean Vigo Prize. His work as a producer won him to work with prestigious directors like Raoul Ruiz (Nucingen House, Dias de Campo), Hou Hsiao-Hsien (The Flight of the Red Balloon), Raymond Depardon (Empty Quarter, une Femme en Afrique), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate) or Costa Gavras and Abbas Kiarostami for the omnibus documentary À propos de Nice, la suite. In 1986 he created the production company of Médecins Sans Frontières in Paris and worked as a journalist during the eighties for Liberation and L’Express, in Africa and Afghanistan. He published a successful book about the Black Jews of Ethiopia, We were the only Jews in the World, in 2008.
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Their works
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Ballet aquatique
event2012 star_border 5.5
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In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Why it is so difficult to count fish in an aquarium? Ruiz, his loyal actor Melvil Poupaud and his producer François Margolin come up with a wide range of hypotheses. With their bone-dry wit, they keep up the tradition of the French pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. (IFFR)
Nucingen House
Act like (voice)
event2009 star_border 6.3
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Surreal gothic comedy about a gambler who wins a strange Chilean mansion and takes his frail wife there.
Flight of the Red Balloon
Producer
event2007 star_border 6.2
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The first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, 'Flight of the Red Balloon' tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's first Western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse.
Mensonge
Director
event1993 star_border 2
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Emma has been happily married to Charles, a hardworking journalist, for over ten years. They have a son, and are considering having another child when she learns that she is both pregnant and HIV-positive at a time when Charles is away. As Emma has never used drugs or slept around, and has never had a blood transfusion, there can only be one source for her infection: her absent husband. Shocked to the core by this turn of events, she goes through his things and finds an address book with the names of many women in it. Determined to discover what has been going on, she begins contacting every name in the book. She continues her investigations even after her husband, whom she confronts over this, returns.
Empty Quarter: A Woman in Africa
Producer
event1985 star_border 7.2
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A man invites a woman to share his room in a hostel and gradually falls in love with her.
Sons of Cain
Producer
event2021 star_border 6
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"Sons of Cain" is set in a small village in northern Albania. In this place time is suspended and the severe rules of an old code (Kanun) still dictate the life and death of the inhabitants. A group of seven children obliged to live under this code meet and discuss the story of Cain and Abel. Creating their own dream space, partially consciously and partially not, they create an analogy between their own stories and Bible stories. Stuck on the fine line between reality and forgetfulness, this is one of the few chances they have to come to grips with their traumas and emotions.
Days in the Country
Producer
event2004 star_border 7.2
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In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality.
Dirty Lands
Producer
event2021 star_border 6.2
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A deminer in the war against Daesh, a Kurdish fighter loses his hand in an accident. He became a taxi driver but, not having a driving license for the disabled, the police seized his vehicle. Under pressure from his wife who wants him to go to Europe, the man is ready for anything...
Sarah Halimi: An Anti-Semitic and Unpunished Crime
Director
event2023
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Sarah Halimi was murdered by her Malian-born neighbor during the French presidential campaign of 2017. The media initially ignored the case before a few journalists managed to mobilize public figures and the President. The investigating judge only wanted to see it as a murder committed by a "madman" having a "delusional episode." This case is emblematic of the rise of anti-Semitism in France today. The various developments in the case, particularly the fact that there are no longer any charges against the murderer, and the prevention of any reconstruction of the case, make it a new Dreyfus Affair. One of the biggest scandals in France today.
Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan
Producer
event2023 star_border 3.7
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"Don Juan woman", according to the expression of Balzac. A princess, a great seductress. Of a diabolical intelligence. This woman, who has had many lovers - almost all the male characters of the "Comédie Humaine" -, will finally find love. The real one. The great one.
Jihadists
Director
event2016 star_border 7.5
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A documentary that takes us to the heart of jihadism in Mali
Boarding Gate
Producer
event2007 star_border 4.9
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A beautiful woman, Sandra, seduces a wealthy businessman, Miles Rennburg. Little does he realise that she has been sent to kill him at the behest of her boyfriend/crime partner, Lester. Controlling all this is Sue, Lester's wife.
Peshmerga
Producer
event2016 star_border 4.5
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From July to December 2015, with a camera team in tow, Bernard-Henri Lévy journeyed 1,000 km along the frontline separating Iraqi Kurdistan from Islamic State troops. The journey resulted in an illustrated logbook offering a special insight into an unfinished war with a global impact. Alongside the Peshmergas – Kurdish fighters imbued with a spirit of unfailing determination in their fight against obscurantism and jihadism, the film takes us from the heights of Mosul to the heart of the Sinjar mountains, passing the last Christian monasteries threatened with destruction along the way. A tale peopled by real characters, men and women whose faces are rarely seen...
Concerning Nice
Producer
event1995 star_border 5.1
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Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.
The Art Dealer
Director
event2015 star_border 3.6
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A young woman is searching, today, in Paris, the collection of paintings stolen from her Jewish family during WWII.
Death in Sarajevo
Producer
event2016 star_border 6.2
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Sarajevo on 28 of June, 2014. At the Hotel Europa, the best hotel in town, the manager Omer prepares to welcome a delegation of diplomatic VIPs. On the centenary of the assassination that is considered to have led to World War I, an appeal for peace and understanding is supposed to start from here. But the hotel staff have other worries: having not been paid for months, they are planning to go on strike. Hatidza from the hotel laundry is elected strike leader even though her daughter Lamija, who works in reception, is firmly against industrial action. Meanwhile, in the sealed-off presidential suite, a guest from France rehearses a speech. Elsewhere, a television reporter conducts interviews about war and its consequences. Was Gavrilo Princip, the 1914 assassin, a criminal or a national hero? What long shadow does his deed cast into the present?
L'automne à Pyongyang, un portrait de Claude Lanzmann
Director
event2023 star_border 6.5
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The last journey in North Korea of Claude Lanzmann, famous director of « Shoah ». He talks about life and death, about communism, about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about « Shoah »... and about himself. A conversation with the director, the portrait of an exceptional man in an exceptional country.
Slava Ukraini
Producer
event2023 star_border 6.9
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One year after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy takes us to the heart of the combat through this war diary made during the second half of 2022. From Kharkiv and Bakhmut to Kherson, in the aftermath of the city’s liberation, this documentary bears witness to the ravages of war through the testimonies of soldiers, chronicles of the front and portraits of civilians, and shares with us the struggle of the Ukrainian people.
The Battle of Mosul
Producer
event2017
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In October of 2016 the battle for Mosul, the Islamic State's self-proclaimed capital in northern Iraq, began. With unprecedented access, Bernard-Henri Lévy and his team follow the Kurdish units and the Iraqi special Golden Division. From street to street, they fight together to regain this city of two million inhabitants. Though successful, the hopes of the Kurdish fighters might not always align with those of their allies.
Paris, The Visit
Director
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A video documentary of Paris.
La Recta Provincia
Associate Producer
event2007 star_border 6.7
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This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.
Secrets
Producer
event2008 star_border 5
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After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current country, godless, far from the old ideologies and where all his old colleagues have changed.
Napalm
Producer
event2017 star_border 4.9
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Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
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