Patrick Deval

Patrick Deval made his first short in 1966 followed by another short, Héraclite l’obscur. He shot one more film under Boissonnas’ patronage, Acéphale bis. The widely travelled Deval’s subsequent returns to filmmaking have all been documentaries.He went to high school in Paris; his teacher of French and Latin was Henri Agel, a cinema critic who had set up a cine club in the Lycée from Cicero to F. W. Murnau, from Racine to Fritz Lang, from Molière to Kenji Mizoguchi; he became cinéphile, haunted the Cinemathèque, met Henri Langlois and Jean Douchet. He did Zoe Bonne in 1966 (he was then 22), it was more out of respect for Jean Renoir and under the influence of comedy à la française. It’s a strangely classical first film.He was interested in documentary since he saw Nuit et brouillard [Alain Resnais, 1956] when he was 16. But the real trigger came after ’68, while he discovered the South, from where he could see the ignorance of the North, and « naïvely thought could document to alleviate it ».