Special Movie Night : MICHEL GONDRY, DO IT YOURSELF at Alliance Française

MICHEL GONDRY, DO IT YOURSELF
Directed by François Nemeta | 2023 | 80 min

If Georges Méliès had a modern-day heir, it would be Michel Gondry. A visionary and eccentric DIY artist, Gondry reshaped the language of the music video and contemporary cinema with a style that is instantly recognizable—handmade, poetic, playful, and deeply human. From iconic collaborations with Björk, Daft Punk, The White Stripes, Beck, and The Rolling Stones, to his Oscar-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry has consistently followed his imagination rather than industry rules.

Michel Gondry, Do It Yourself offers a rare and intimate journey into his inventive creative process, from his earliest video clips to the making of The Book of Solutions, selected at Cannes in 2023. Directed by François Nemeta—Gondry’s longtime collaborator and former first assistant—the film draws on rich personal archives and testimonies from artists such as Kylie Minogue, Beck, Jack White, Spike Jonze, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Jack Black.

At its core, Gondry’s DIY practice is both a celebration of wonder and a quiet political act: a belief in imperfection, imagination, and making things by hand. As he prepares a new studio musical starring Pharrell Williams, Janelle Monáe, Missy Elliott, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, this documentary reminds us why Gondry remains one of the most singular and inspiring artists of our time.

Welcome to the handmade, marginal universe of a true magician of images.

Director’s biography 12-02-1971 Melun (France)
An essential music video director (Biolay, Souchon, Modjo), flirting for several years with documentaries and fiction, François Nemeta was Michel Gondry's first assistant for ten years. From Daft Punk clips to those of Björk, he witnessed live the hair- raising irruption of the French clipper on the screens of MTV and then its Hollywood take-off. It is him that the filmmaker has agreed to follow to draw this unique portrait which will be full of memories and personal archives.

Director’s brief comment on the film
Punk teenager dreaming of Méliès, Gondry has woven in three decades an admirable, fascinating, imperfect body of work. The brilliant French underground clipper, turned American filmmaker, has managed to escape the embarrassing stereotype of the little French employee in the beautiful country of Hollywood, because his cinema lives elsewhere: he is as much Franco-American as he is Hindu and Lapp. He is world. From a long-term interview, woven from exhilarating archives and testimonies from the talents that inhabit his work, welcome to the marginal, hand-made universe of a tight rope walker of dreams, time and memory; a work that bears in its flesh, with pride, the disturbed world it describes.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Alliance Française de San Francisco