Jean Francois Stevenin, the Outsider of French Cinema

Though his name may not mean much to Greek audiences, Jean-Francois Stevenin is a familiar figure in French Cinema. Short, gruff and bald, he has appeared, over the past thirty years, in more than 100 films, from Truffaut (Day for Night, Small Change) and Godard (Passion), to Rivette (Out 1), as well as younger filmmakers, while also acting in dozens of current films and TV movies.

But, besides being an actor, Jean-Francois Stevenin is a very special film director; an extraordinarily original filmmaker, who, through his oeuvre of a mere three films, made in 1978, 1985 and 2001, has succeeded in putting together a body of work marked by a unique and rare coherence. And admirer of Cassavetes and Celine, Stevenin infuses French Cinema with an air of freedom and an unclassifiable gaze, a romantic and meditative mood, a strange and at the same time familiar fragrance of lyricism, springing from the warmth and maturity of his characters and the relationships that exist among them; an unexpected cosmic poetry of space and nature.
All three of his films walk the fine line between the fairytale and the chronicle; the mountain western and the apprenticeship novel; the personal epic and the joke among friends.
All three of his films begin with chance encounters between men who are either meeting for the first time or run into each other after many years. These meetings are destined to suddenly take on an inordinate importance, developing into escapist tendencies and entangling the puerile heroes in unpredictable adventures, which provide release and, often, much amusement. And yet, however bizarre these situations are, they never become cheap or kitsch. On the contrary, in the most mocking gestures, in the most playful dialogs, there is a truth to be found burning brightly. It is a truth which is emitted by the heroes and which has to do with their nativeness as typical Frenchmen, fortune-seekers who have lost their bearings, idlers, or "funnymen" in their own little world, with their idiomatic language and expressions, a truth we had not felt so intensely since Renoir and Pialat.
O Jean-Francois Stevenin is a cult filmmaker.

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