Claire Simon & Lee Anne Schmitt

Evidence is both an analysis of corporate spending and the impact of dark money on US politics and ideology and a personal meditation on ideas of family and care.

Masterclass at DOK Leipzig 2025

California Company Town, the much-anticipated essay film by Lee Anne Schmitt, casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise...

A meditation. The menace of night and the memory of trauma. A film about violence and the trace it leaves.

A meditation on the eradication of the Chumash culture, but also on the conflict between the spirits and the material.

A portrait of the river wash that runs behind the older part of Newhall, California, describing the ways the wash is used, and also the people who use it.

Made at the start of the pandemic, Lee Anne Schmitt’s short contrasts the tranquillity of nature with a sense of underlying dread at the state of the world.

One of the last free ranging herds of American Bison is located in the Henry Mountains. Each year, a hunt is held on the herd to cull its numbers…

The modern history of racism and slavery in America, retold in a film about a radical white activist’s attempted revolution and death sentence in 1859.

Paris, Gare du Nord, a place where anything can happen and even trains pull in at all hours of the day. We'd like to linger, but have to get on our way... Like the thousands of lives that cross paths here, Ismaël, Mathilde, Sacha, and Joan encounter each other in the bustling crowds...

A documentary portrait of the Gare du Nord. Countless people pass through the station and cross it, whether they come from the Paris suburbs, provincial France or abroad.

In this choral film, we share in the daily lives of five family planning consellors who advise the adolescent girls and women who come to speak with them...

Manon, 15, meets Greg, 17, while on vacation. He lives in Claviers, a little village in France’s Haut-Var region, while she lives in Paris. Greg and Manon are in love...

The film tells the story of young Antoine’s trip to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. A recent graduate from the school of political science, he is looking for work...

With money from his in-laws, Jihad opens a small eatery. Despite the commitment of his employees and the abundance of good products, things aren’t going well...

A short documentary film about Maria and her blurred memories. The more the director asks about the details of the story, the less sure Maria is about what happened.

When the bell rings, the courtyard of a nursery school transforms from an empty space to an animated stage. Finally freed, the little ones pretend to be adults. A small philosophical treatise about living together.

Claire Simon taught herself filmmaking, via editing. She moved towards documentary film, even if her aesthetics would never cease to blur the boundaries separating documentary from fiction...