André Dartevelle (Belgium)

André Dartevelle, born on August 21, 1944 and died on March 14, 2014, was a full-fledged documentary film director for about 20 years. After training as a historian at the ULB, he was for 33 years successively journalist, reporter and documentary filmmaker at the Belgian public television, RTBF. Today, independent: it is through reporting in contact with human and social realities, war, violence, the disintegration of ways of life by the economy, solitudes but also the vitality of struggles, initiatives, the beauty of solidarity, feelings that nourish resistance, - that he came to documentary. He was also a professor at INSAS, where he taught the history of television. As a reporter, he belonged to the great reporting services of our public channel, NINE MILLION NINE, FOLLOWING, STRIP TEASE, TRACES, PORTRAIT. He created the documentary film unit TRACES and then PORTRAIT. All these titles have disappeared. For the last fifteen years, his documentaries have been mainly co-financed by the ARTE channel, with independent production. Defining himself as a "filmmaker", André Dartevelle created at the crossroads of cinéma-vérité and social cinema, working on themes of predilection such as architecture, the Second World War, the struggles around the world (Beirut 78, Salavdor, Palestine, ...). About his commitment, he said he was "a director in resistance".