Colette Piault

Colette Piault, born in Paris, received a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1963. She has conducted fieldwork in West Africa, France and Greece. Her first film, Albertine et Dorcas, was shot in the Ivory Coast in 1966 while simultanously working on a different ethnographic project under the direction of Jean Rouch. She started to work in a village in Epirus (Greece) in 1974 and shot in 16mm a series of six films (Greek original version, subtitled in French or English) about aspects of migration from the point of view of the deserted village, trying to carefully observe the pace of the events and daily life rather than to restructure them through a commentary or other devices. Colette Piault is presently honorary Director of Research at CNRS (Paris, France). She created the French Association for Visual Anthropology (SFAV) in 1985 of which she is still President. She has published several papers in French and English about her field work and visual anthropology. She created and organized an annual international research film seminar, "Looking at European Societies" between 1982 and 1992; she has worked as a lecturer at the Anthropology Department at the University of Paris X-Nanterre (1995-1998) and has been a member of the selection committees for the Film Festivals at Gšttingen (1993-1996) and Nuoro (1988-2000).

She presented her films in universities and international film festivals in several different countries such as, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, NewZealand, Norway, Poland, Roumania, Russia, South Africa, Sweeden, Switzerland, Tunisia, United Kingdom, USA...

Films:
Charcoal-Makers
Dead Presumed Missing?
Every Day is Not A Feast Day
A Hard Life
Let's Get Married
My Family and Me
Thread of The Needle

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