Frederick Wiseman

Born in 1930 in Boston, Fred­er­ick Wise­man grad­u­at­ed in law in 1954 from Yale Law School. From his first doc­u­men­tary film, Titi­cut Fol­lies in 1967, he affirmed his basic prin­ci­ples: the absence of inter­views, off-air com­men­tary and addi­tion­al music. Edit­ing, which he car­ries out him­self, is an impor­tant stage in the process of cre­at­ing his films and gen­er­al­ly lasts 12 months. In 1971, in order to guar­an­tee cre­ative inde­pen­dence, he cre­at­ed his own pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny Zip­po­rah Films. He thus pro­duced 46 doc­u­men­tary films which com­pose a mosa­ic por­trait of con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, the Unit­ed States, France and their insti­tu­tions. A real aware­ness of pol­i­tics runs through this essen­tial work which can undoubt­ed­ly be con­sid­ered as “a sin­gle, very long film which would last more than 100 hours”. Fred­er­ick Wise­man also directs two fic­tion films: The Last Let­ter in 2002 and A Cou­ple in 2022; he also works for the the­ater. In Paris, he staged “La belle d’Amherst”, a play by William Luce on the life of Emi­ly Dick­in­son and two plays at the Comédie Française: “Oh les beaux jours” by Samuel Beck­ett and “The last let­ter”, based on a chap­ter of Vas­sili Gross­man­’s nov­el, “Life and Des­tiny”. Fred­er­ick Wise­man has won numer­ous awards, includ­ing four Emmys, a Gold­en Lion for Life­time Achieve­ment at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val in 2014, and an Hon­orary Oscar from the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences’ Board of Gov­er­nors in 2016. In 2021, he received the Car­rosse d’or from the SRF for his entire career at the Cannes Film Festival.