Bernard Simon

Bernard Simon

Biography

As director, camera man and editor, Bernard Simon has produced countless documentaries and reports. In 1996 he founded the production and sales company “Arc-en-ciel” in Normandy and makes films for NGOs, amongst other clients, many of which are based in Africa.  He has made films profiling traditional singers from the Ivory Coast (“Une jupe, trois cordes et un chapeau”, 1997), documented the civil war in the west African country (“Paroles d´Ivoire”, 2005) and accompanied children on their first journey back to the home country of their parents, who fled Ethiopia during the war at the start of the 1990s (“Retour en Ethiopie”, 2009). Several of Bernard Simon’s documentaries remind his French countrymen of how hundreds of thousands of African colonial soldiers contributed to France escaping Nazi rule. During his research in Madagascar, he found old men in almost every single village he visited who had fought in Europe during the Second World War (“Tirailleurs Malgaches”, 2003). The same was true when he explored the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and visited Casablanca (“Ziddou l’gouddam – Les survivants”, 2007). One thing they all have in common is a resentment of the discriminatory treatment that they experienced from the French colonial powers. In his film “Frères de sang – Tirailleurs de l’Empire” (Blood Brothers – Soldiers of the Empire, 2008), Bernard Simon summarises 150 years‘ history of African colonial soldiers serving in the French military with intriguing archive footage, spanning from Napoléon III to the First and Second World Wars and through to the present day.

bernardsimon.com

Filmography

Zidou l'Gouddam - Les survivants (2007): Producer

Tirailleurs Malgaches (2003): Direction

Frères de sang - Tirailleurs de l'Empire (2008): Editing, Camera, Direction