Sylvain George (born 1968 in Vaulx-en-Velin) is a French director, writer and producer.
After studying philosophy, law, political cinema and cinema George completed his first short films in the mid 2000s. Standing in the tradition of the cinétract or newsreel, these early works, first shot on Super 8 and then in digital, which would go on to become his medium of choice, always in black and white, pose a simple, but radical question: what is a political film? The answer that already formulates itself, and that George will build on is double: at once, the filmmaker is interested in documenting political movements of the present he traverses, like 15-M in Spain (
Vers Madrid - The Burning Bright), or Nuit Debout in France (
Paris est une fête - Un film en 18 vagues), and secondly, his filmmaking is conceived as a political gesture, not content in being a simple bystander, but rather becoming an active part in the conception of the film. Sylvain George, as
Georges Didi-Huberman wrote of
Harun Farocki, is a filmmaker "that takes a stance".
