Bertrand Mandico

Bertrand Mandico (born 21 March 1971) is a French film director and screenwriter. His first feature film, The Wild Boys (2017), was named the best film of 2018 by Cahiers du Cinéma. He has also written and directed After Blue (2021), She Is Conann (2023), Dragon Dilatation (2024), and the upcoming film Roma elastica. His films are often interested in the body and gender fluidity and incorporate photos and written elements.

Early life

Mandico was born on 21 March 1971 in Toulouse, France. He graduated from the film directing program at the Gobelins school in Paris in 1993.

Career

Mandico has directed short films, medium-length films, experimental essays, and feature films. Mandico has an unusual working method. He prefers to create the audio for his films in post-production. Actors post-synchronize themselves, and the environmental sounds and music are layered on. However, he always shoots his images on color film, with no post-production images. Background projection and superimposition are done during the shoot.

Mandico's first animated short film, The Blue Cavalier, won the Annecy Prize Grant in 1998.

Mandico created the Incoherence Manifesto in 2012 with Icelandic filmmaker Katrín Ólafsdóttir. He states that:

To be incoherent means to have faith in cinema, it means to have a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration.

A group of young filmmakers including Yann Gonzalez, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have been influenced by the manifesto.

Mandico has commenced "20+1 Projections", a collaborative project with Romanian-American actress Elina Löwensohn, where they are to make 21 short films in 21 years. Though each film is meant to be a unique narrative and formal work, they are to revolve around the themes of aging and desire. As of 2018, they have shot 8 films and completed 6 of them.

Mandico explores non-binary identities and gender fluidity in his films, often casting women to play male characters. He was named best director at the Vilnius International Film Festival in 2018 for The Wild Boys (2017), in which all five male protagonists were played by women. It was also named the best film of 2018 by French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

In 2021, he wrote and directed the science fiction film After Blue. In 2023, he wrote and directed the action fantasy She Is Conann, a feminist take on Conan the Barbarian. In 2024, he wrote and directed the experimental film Dragon Dilatation, combining two film essays: an adaptation of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Petrouchka, and footage from a cancelled stage production rehearsed at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers titled The Deviant Comedy.

His upcoming fifth feature film, Roma elastica, starring Marion Cotillard, was shot in 2025.

Personal life

Mendico identifies as non-binary, pansexual, agender and xenogender. Mandico uses both male and female pronouns.

Filmography

Mandico has directed feature films, short films, TV-commercials and musical films.

Feature films

Short films

External links

• at IMDb
• at AlloCiné (in French)