Filmography
Gallery
View the galleryProjects
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Science fiction · Italy
La donna androide
Feature film · Language: Italian · Screenplay completed
A romantic science-fiction drama set in Rome. The film blends scientific realism, romance and a reflection on consciousness — a modern fable about the birth of awareness. Looking for a lead producer in France, Italy or Germany.
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Thriller · Italy
Giulia nella notte
Feature film · Language: Italian · Screenplay completed
A Hitchcockian thriller set in Rome. Giulia, a cabaret dancer, leads her own investigation when the man she loves is accused of murder. Written for Italian actress Giulia Di Quilio.
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Romance · Corsica
The Moon in the Sky
Feature film · Language: English · Screenplay completed · France / Italy
Set in Corsica in June 1969, weeks before Apollo 11. An American astronaut meets Eva, a mysterious young Russian woman. A contemplative romance between science, dream and the quest for the absolute.
About
Jean-Michel Després is a French author, director and independent producer born in Roanne on 12 May 1970. His career has developed outside the most institutional paths, yet with a rare continuity: that of a filmmaker who, film after film, pursues a deeply personal body of work built around imagination, desire, memory and the search for beauty.
Drawn from an early age to storytelling, voices and sonic atmospheres, he joined Radio France in Paris at the age of twenty-two, where he worked for several years on radio dramas for France Culture. This experience profoundly shaped his relationship to narrative: in his work, voice, silence, the inner music of characters and the invisible dimension of storytelling occupy an essential place.
Alongside his work in radio, he wrote and directed his first films. From his earliest works, his cinema revealed a distinctive sensibility: a fascination with solitary characters, mysterious female figures, decisive encounters, memory-laden places and situations in which reality seems to open itself to dream.
His work stands at the crossroads of romanticism, atmospheric cinema, intimate storytelling and a highly personal visual language. Jean-Michel Després does not conceive cinema merely as narration, but as a sensory experience: an art capable of giving rise to emotion through a face, a light, a movement, a silence or a presence.
His films often portray beings in search of something: love, artistic creation, identity or inner truth. Places — Paris at night, the banks of the Seine, the Loire, Rome, Prague and nature itself — become mental spaces as much as settings. Women occupy a central place in his imagination as figures of revelation: muse, lover, symbolic mother, mysterious presence or being in transformation.
