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| Jean Darrigol, 1997 Tournage du Voleur de diagonale |
Jean Darrigol was born at Mouguerre and grew up in Urcuit in the Basque Country and currently resides in Biarritz.
He holds graduate degrees from the universities of Pau & Pays de l'Adour (History) and Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (specialization on Joseph L. Mankiewicz).
After teaching and moderating the film club at the University of Calabar in Nigeria (1984-86), he became involved in the design of institutional films and documentaries (exhibitions, video documents, including Des épidémies et des hommes for the L'Homme et la Santé exhibit at Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Mars l'Imaginaire - 10mn – at the Patrimoine Terre, l'ère de l'espace exhibit, Paris 1992), in the wake of a student short film entitled Le Dérangement (video, 5mn, 1990) telling the story of a passer-by absorbed by a recalcitrant phone booth.
A research on movies linked to the Basque Country and his encounter with Ray Bradbury and an article published in Le Mensuel du Cinéma later oriented his career to film critique and journalism (Le Mensuel du Cinéma, L'Ecran, Vertigo, La Saison cinématographique along with Côté femme, Canal Satellite magazine, Illico, TéléK7...), and an ongoing collaboration with TF1 Films Productions (script reading) and Semaine Internationale de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival which he represented in Los Angeles where he lived between 1998 and 2001.
Concurrently Jean directed Lapses of Light, Newberry in Rhodes (10 mn, 1995), an amateur “videopastel” documentary about Californian painter Michael Newberry (distributed along with the artist’s exhibit in Rhodes and Brussels at the Acte-Expo Gallery).
His first fictional short film "Le Voleur de diagonale - Zeihar Lapurra" (16mn, 35mm, 1997) was produced by G.R.E.C. (Groupe de Recherches et d'Essais Cinématographiques) and the non-profit association Où est la lune?. A dreamlike trilingual ballad (where the same text, a translated Chinese poem, is repeated in each language), this short film about recollections of a bed and the potency of an “attachment”, was screened in numerous film festivals (Cannes, Toronto, Saint Sebastian, Rome, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Kerala-India, Turkey), in movie theaters (Paris, Biarritz, Bayonne, Les Aldudes) as well as on the festival concert stage at the “Errobiko Festibala” in Itxassou.
Concurrently Jean directed Lapses of Light, Newberry in Rhodes (10 mn, 1995), an amateur “videopastel” documentary about Californian painter Michael Newberry (distributed along with the artist’s exhibit in Rhodes and Brussels at the Acte-Expo Gallery).
His first fictional short film "Le Voleur de diagonale - Zeihar Lapurra" (16mn, 35mm, 1997) was produced by G.R.E.C. (Groupe de Recherches et d'Essais Cinématographiques) and the non-profit association Où est la lune?. A dreamlike trilingual ballad (where the same text, a translated Chinese poem, is repeated in each language), this short film about recollections of a bed and the potency of an “attachment”, was screened in numerous film festivals (Cannes, Toronto, Saint Sebastian, Rome, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Kerala-India, Turkey), in movie theaters (Paris, Biarritz, Bayonne, Les Aldudes) as well as on the festival concert stage at the “Errobiko Festibala” in Itxassou.
Ainara is Darrigol’s first feature film which he started writing with initial support from the “Centre des Écritures Cinématographiques du Moulin d'Andé”. He later received additional support from the Aquitaine Regional Government and the Basque Cultural Institute (Euskal Kultur Erakundea).
