Flemish Jean-Claude Barny

At the origins of its cinema

Born in Guadeloupe, Jean Claude Barny joined at 6 years the Hexagon in the West-Indian dash of the Bumidom. He grows in Argenteuil, in the middle of the concrete of suburban cities from which he refuses fatalism very quickly. Seeking to affirm itself very quickly, it makes street, with its dynamism, its own school. It is devoted to the competitions of judo. This martial art will contribute to forge its character, at the same time tolerant but pugnacious. The city, the escapades in Paris, the music, the meetings Hip Hop avant-gardist and the novels socio-urban Afro-Americans authors form his universe of teenager. True treasure under the concrete cover, the movies club of Argenteuil is added like loophole. It is a source of inspiration which makes him discover the chiefs-D' works of the Sixties and Seventies. Its schoolmasters are called Charles Chaplin, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick or Akira Kurosawa.

Jean-Claude Barny multiplies transfered on Paris to draw aside the cement walls of his city. He takes an active part in the emergence of the Hip Hop movement. Little by little, it creates its own weapons, very quickly forges a personality of teenager engaged culturally in his time and its context.

It is initially the music which federates its new nourished saving energy of the images and the sound cinematographic. The sounds Afro-Americans of militant singers build little by little the musical world of Jean-Claude. Very quickly, with his friend Teddy Exposito (one of the producers of DJ Jazz Jeff), it animates “Black Star Music” on a station FM, Radio Ile-de-France. It imposes on it pieces music funk and Soul. It is with return of the birth of rep. Thanks to the music, Jean-Claude escapes from the ghetto and very quickly establishes the link between the world out of the city and his rage to leave a destiny crushed by the concrete Argenteuil. While going up on Paris, armed with its cinematographic passion, it multiplies the meetings and very quickly becomes a close relation of Mathieu Kassovitz with which it shares the same desires and the same ideologies.

Between short and clips, a realizer nait'

Trainee on the spot of turnings it takes his first steps in the cinematographic realization. He is present on Métisse. His/her friend Mathieu Kassovitz, allured by his engagement and his strength of character, proposes to him to direct the casting of film Hatred”. Autodidact in the heart, Jean-Claude learns in parallel, observing the techniques of turning which it very quickly integrates on his own projects. Before to have created the association of young “Known But Known” artists, in 1994, it launches out in the realization of its first two short films, Putain of Door, expenses and funny where the new wave of future actors of international repute are joined together: Said Taghmaoui, Benoit Magimel, Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Kassovitz and Lea Drucker. When it finishes its last short-measuring, the Contract, a film denouncing the prejudices in France, it already accumulated many prices and rewards in several festivals.

Jean-Claude Barny is a man who knows where it goes. He quickly creates his first production unit, Kalibre, with which he produces the first clip of Abd Al Malik, I come from the districts.

Once launched, Jean Claude does not stop any more realizing. With the fact of its communicative musical passion, very quickly of the artists like Uncle David, Neg' Chestnuts, Doc Gynéco, Melgrove, Poetic Lovers, Kassav or Melgrove contact it for the realization of their clips. In parallel of some advertizing projects, it improves with the wire of the projects its control of the plans, the camera, of the executives, with a given goal: to make large cinema very quickly.

beginnings of a committed cinema

In 2004, Jean Claude Barny proved reliable with the image. He decides from now on to enter the content of the cinema. He uses the formidable machine of the image to the intention of an awakening that it wishes to divide of another France. With its discussed history and its discriminations which still wound the French resulting from the old colonies or descendants of slaves.

Halfway between France and the United States, the Inhabitant of Guadeloupe Jean Claude Barny clearly defines his cinema as a cinema with an identity caraïbéenne in whole share, halfway between the European cinema and the American cinema. A cinema conscious, deep, intended for the general public.

The idea of Neg Maron was born in 1999. Co-writing with Alain Agat, product leave Mathieu Kassovitz and Richard Magnien. This project of feature-length film definitively makes it turn over to its roots, with lived as of his. Jean-Claude Barny wants to fight the generally accepted ideas on the Guadeloupe. He wants to see reformed the image which the Hexagon has of the Guadeloupe and to present the basic problems, to propose it Malayan which touches a désœuvrée population, without future and often put at the variation. He moves definitively in the Antilles in 2000 to continue this project. The history, in the content, is very strongly related to that of Jean Claude. It selected as main actors the singer of reggae-dancehall inhabitant of Guadeloupe Admiral T and Daly.

Against any waiting, Neg Maron exceeds the 300.000 entries in France and in Dom, which inserts definitively Jean Claude Barny in the row of the scenario writers of French reputation.

It is very quickly located by producing the Elisabeth Arnac, which very quickly engages it after the exit into the room of Neg Maron on another facet of the Antilles: its history, its “négritude” and the slave system which marked the West-Indian population without the problem really being ever dug. Elisabeth Arnac allows him to carry out Bitter Tropiques in 2007. It is about a series in 6 episodes reconsidering this time when France used the slaves to develop his sugar economy. These television series are a true success, with more than 4,5 million televiewers to each diffusion of a new episode. The film is dissociated by its rate/rhythm, by the quality of the decorations, the play of the actors and a setting in bold scene. http://www.tropiquesamers.com

Today, Jean Claude Barny launches out in its second cinematographic feature-length film, the Wall of Silence, a psychological thriller. He puts in scene the combat of a militant in a prison medium. It is the continuity of its social engagement for a better recognition and a real appreciation of human freedom. In the Wall of Silence, Inspired by the autobiographical book of Loîc Léry “the Gang of the West-Indians”, Jean Claude attacks another bitter period of France afro, the time of the Seventies during which France rameuté in metropolis the West-Indians, making them gleam a comfortable future. Cruel disillusion: this lure has in fact parked of the hundreds of thousands of West-Indian in shantytowns then, once those demolished to satisfy the propriety, the all-as much disasters ghettos of the Parisian suburbs. http://www.lemurdusilence.com

Catalog of films

1993 : Mongrel of Mathieu Kassovitz
1997: the sky is with us of Graham Guit

; Realizer

2005: Nèg maron

2007 : Bitter Tropics

External bond

Card-index IMDb

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