
Jean-Gabriel Leynaud
Camera
Biography
Jean-Gabriel Leynaud began his career in filmmaking at a very young age, pursuing a career as a camera assistant in fiction and as a cinematographer in documentaries. At 19, he made his first film, Place de la République, in which he followed two young homeless drug addicts for a year. Since then, he has directed around fifteen documentaries. He has also directed more than sixty documentaries for cinema, television, as well as fiction and commercials. His films have been selected for major festivals (Venice, Sundance, Tribeca, FIPA, etc.) and screened at the Cinémathèque Française and the ASC. He was nominated in 2025 for best documentary photography at the AFC awards.
Known For

French current affair show
Infrarouge

Greenland has become a major geopolitical issue between the United States, Europe, Russia, and China due to its geographical location and mineral resources. Its geopolitical destiny will have significant ecological consequences for the entire planet. What choice will the people of Greenland make? The largest island in the world, with its 2.2 million square kilometers covered 80% by ice, is also one of the least densely populated territories on Earth, with barely 57,000 inhabitants. Mainly living off fishing, tourism, and Danish subsidies, yet sitting on a potential treasure. We are talking about 25% of the world's hydrocarbon reserves, the third-largest uranium reserves, and 20% of rare earths. An icy Eldorado that today sparks all sorts of ambitions, one of the hotspots where the future of our multipolar world is being shaped. This is what the film will explore, addressing both its economic and commercial challenges, as well as its geo-ecological and military implications.
Greenland: The Icy Eldorado

Cats are cuddly felines and lovely pets, but also highly evolved predators that hunt huge amounts of small mammals, birds and reptiles; perfect killing machines that threaten delicate ecosystems around the world.
The Cat: A Cuddly Killer

In 2043, Melissa, a young eco-worker, sails the Mediterranean Sea on her smart boat the Rainbow, with her trained dog Cham. As she collects mass of drifting plastic waste, she sorts and trades this material on the global recycling market. One day, she saves a baby monkey from drowning, and takes him on the boat. This encounter will change the path of her life.
Sauvage

The beauty of the Arctic is breathtaking. For as long as we can remember, the Arctic has been associated with inhospitable cold. But the climate is changing, and with it the northern polar region, which begins beyond latitude 66.5 degrees north. Climate change is now happening four times faster north of the Arctic Circle than on the rest of the planet, making the future outlook dire. At the moment it is still possible for polar bears to raise their cubs, but hunting is becoming increasingly difficult on the drastically shrinking pack ice. The disappearance of the ice also affects the marine fauna. The wintry ice bridge between Canada and Greenland is threatened with collapse. The unstoppable melting of the permafrost, which has held the tundra together for thousands of years, is worrying. But the Arctic is still one of the wildest and loveliest regions on earth. A documentary visit to the Arctic - as long as it still exists.
The Arctic: 66.5 Degrees North

Mandela’s legend is built on his absence, during his 27- year incarceration. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela is released, South Africa is waiting for their Messiah. But he doesn’t know it yet, he is the most famous political prisoner of the Planet. Will he be up to the challenge?
Nelson Mandela, Beyond the Myth

Numbi, a little village hidden deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo mountains, lies nonetheless at the heart of our world. Here, with their bare hands, miners dig the coltan which will find its way – legally or otherwise – to our industrialized world. For decades this grey gold, indispensable to the manufacture of almost all contemporary technological devices, has been the cause of conflicts and a bitter exploitation. In Numbi, bodies are covered in mud, hands red with blood, and coltan hides in every pocket. Every inhabitant lives with the illusory hope of escaping fate and enjoying for themselves the riches of the Congo. Sensitive, shocking and deeply moving, Of Mud and Blood documents the everyday existence of the inhabitant of Numbi, revealing the hardships and trials of a story from which we must not look away.
Of Mud and Blood

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La Vie sans Brahim

A feminist legend, a May 68 activist, a famous playwright and poet, Hélène Cixous is the vehicle of this road movie. With friends like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the artist Adel Abdessemed, with Ariane Mnouchkine and her cosmopolitan theatre company, Cixous explores the wounds our time and allows us to ear the cry of literature. The history of dozens of members of her German-Jewish family who were assassinated in the Death Camps, and the trauma of the wars of decolonization are never far, for this major figure who was born in Algeria shortly before the start of the Second World War.
Ever, rêve, Helene Cixous

Film on the recording of Peter Doherty's and Frédéric Lo's 2021 album "The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime" in Doherty's Normandy home.
The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime

For the last fifteen years, French mountaineer, explorer and writer Laurence de la Ferrière has been scaling the heights of the world's highest tops, and in 1997 became the first French woman to reach the South Pole single-handed. Two years later, she attempts to cross the Antarctic from the South Pole to the French base of Dumont d'Urville. A 3,000 km long challenge over 3 months filled with unexpected hurdles.