Philippe Lacôte was born in 1971 in Abidjan and grew up next to a movie theatre –

“The Magic." As he began to study linguistics, he became a radio enthusiast, before

he turned to film and started making short films. In 1989, he made a series of sound

portraits on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years later, he made his first short film,

Somnambule, in black and white. In 1995, he directed the black and white The

Messenger, starring Denis Lavant, presented at the Rotterdam International Film

Festival. In 2001, he co-directed with Delphine Jaquet Affaire Libinski, a short film made up of stills, reminiscent of Chris Marker’s : The Jetty.

 

In 2001, he felt like going back to documentary filmmaking – Cairo Hours portrayed Cairo through the wanderings of young Egyptian writers from the Movement 90. One year later, he set off for Ivory Coast to make a film on his childhood friends. Three days later, the rebellion broke out. He decided to film his neighborhood, Wassakara, in the working-class suburb of Yopougon, during the first three weeks of the curfew. It took him five years and ended up as an artwork, halfway between an essay, a documentary and a diary – Chronicles of War in the Ivory Coast. In 2010, Philippe Lacôte produced Lonesome Solo’s Burn it up Djassa, which was shot in 

 

11 days in the Abidjan suburb and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the Panorama Selection of the Berlin Film Festival in 2012. In 2013, he directed To Repel Ghosts, a fiction film on the unrecognized journey of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to Ivory Coast. RUN, which won the Jerusalem Film Lab Award, is Lacôte’s first feature. It was presented at the Un certain regard selection of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

 

 

Filmography:

 

Films:

RUN (2014) Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2014

 

Documentary Films:

Chronicles of War in the Ivory Coast (2008)

Cairo Hours (2003)

 

Short Films:

To Repel Ghosts (2013) Toronto International Film Festival

The Messenger (2004) Rotterdam International Film Festival 

The Libinski Case (2001) Hong-Kong Film Festival 

Sleepwalker (1996)