Jean-Stéphane Bron

Born in Lausanne in 1969, Jean-Stéphane Bron is graduated from the Lausanne’s Cantonal Art School (ECAL). His documentaries deal with issues of our time: the crisis of democracy, the economic crisis, the rise of populism. Using dramaturgical devices close to those of fiction, his films maintain a special relationship with genre cinema. Among them, Known to Our Departments (1997) deals with the scandal of the political files compiled by the Federal Police in the 60s and 80s; The Way I Look at You - Five Stories of Driving School (1999) wins the New York Times Original Vision Award; Corn in Parliament (2003), one of the major box-office successes of Swiss cinema with over 100,000 admissions, follows the work of a parliamentary commission in charge of a law on genetic engineering; The Blocher Experience (2013), a portrait of billionaire and national-populist leader Christoph Blocher, caused a stir at the time of its release; Cleveland Versus Wall Street (2010), about the subprime crisis, is presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight and nominated for a César Award; in 2017, The Paris Opera is presented at the Moscow Film Festival and at CoLCoA Festival (Los Angeles), and in 2018, for the third time, Jean-Stéphane Bron wins the Swiss Film Prize in the Best Documentary category for this film. Jean-Stéphane Bron also directs his first feature film in 2007, My Brother Is Getting Married, selected at the Locarno Film Festival. In 2018, he directs the short film Vers le silence for the 3e Scène, the digital platform of the Paris Opera. His latest documentary for cinema, The Brain (2022), looks at the work of five scientists on artificial intelligence. Jean-Stéphane Bron is also co-founder of the Swiss production company Bande à Part Films.