A historian and a documentary filmmaker by training, I have become an expert image-hunter... I developed my craft at the crossing of the different roads I haven taken throughout my career.
I was born in 1981 a 100km from Paris and raised to the sounds of the Polish language. Among my first visual memories are the credit sequences of French TV shows RécréA2 and Téléchat, black and white film compilations on VHS, the music videos for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Rita Mitsouko’s Marcia Baila or Run DMC; seeing the death of the Ceausescus live on the evening news, or watching historian Marc Ferro’s Histoires Parallèles on Sunday evenings. I obtained my high school diploma with a specialty in Literature at the time of library cards, DVDs, the last gasp of cassette mixtapes, when Jackie Brown was in the theaters.
I majored in History at Université Paris-I, listening to my portable CD player as I roamed libraries, taking notes as I did research at the Paris Film Library (BiFi) at Ledru-Rollin, alternating jobs as a phone operator, data entry clerk, cataloger when I was not granny-sitting.
After defending my master's thesis in history analyzing french army films during the algerian decolonization war and directing my 1st short as part of a master's degree in documentary cinema, I got my start in audiovisual production thanks to duets of women. In 2006, I met Anne Gaussens and Valérie Massignon, the founders of one of the 1st researchers company in France : XY Zèbre. Working at their side, I became an archive researcher, my main job for the past fifteen years.
I’m the link between producers (Les Films d’ici, Program33, Gédéon, Camera One…) and audiovisual sources. I support cinematographers, artists, museographers and scenographers in conceptualizing audiovisual projects crossing archival images and (hi)story. I accompany them throughout the production process, from development to completion, from researching images to negotiating copyrights and permission in post-production, for documentary and fiction films, art exhibitions, museum collections and patrimonial content.
I inherited my know-how from my peers and now pass it on to younger generations: since 2017, I have been training researchers at Université Paris-Saclay and Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) Sup.
In 2016, I wrote Noire Amérique, a series of documentary shorts that I also co-directed with Florent de la Tullaye. The series was broadcast on ARTE.
Among my current projects are documentary films, a concept where film screenings would mix visual archives, literature and music. I recently started practicing argentic photography again. I have also been improvising short montages mixing archival footage and song. I recently produced a pilot for a podcast focused on class.
I designed the Archiva* icon as a symbolic household god, thinking of the different skills I acquired along the years as its attributes. I always keep bits and pieces of archives layered in the back of my eye.
The adventure continues...
Caroline
