| Jean-Christophe Jeauffre | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 26, 1966 France |
Jean-Christophe Jeauffre is an award-winning filmmaker, a screenwriter and a producer, environmentalist and creator of the Jules Verne International Film Festival born in France, April 26, 1966.
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After graduating in French literature, he joined the French Navy in 1990 for two years on Aircraft-carrier Foch during the Lebanon war and was in charge of the ship’s Television production unit where he made his first reportages and documentaries for the Navy. In 1991 in Paris, Jeauffre founded the nonprofit Jules Verne Adventures along with Frédéric Dieudonné. Dedicated to exploration, conservation, and education, the organization is now based both in Paris and in Los Angeles. In 1992, Jeauffre and Dieudonné launched the annual Paris Jules Verne Festival, inaugurated by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. This event, now also based in Los Angeles, California,[1] is dedicated to exploration, education and conservation.[2][3] Then they developed a production unit to create new adventure & exploration programs for television. The Jules Verne Festival is held each year in April at the Grand Rex theatre of Paris, Europe’s largest movie theatre, where it attracts more than 35,000 visitors and guests.
Jeauffre’s passion for exploration and for the sea led him to conceive scientific expeditions and to create a new concept of documentaries he called Action-documentaries, mixing real-life exploration with fictional content. From 1999 to 2010, Jeauffre wrote, directed and co-produced several films for TV which included Devil's Islands and Red and White.
A five-month expedition on the Atlantic aboard the tall ship Belem led to his production of the highly acclaimed and award-winning documentaries:
Two fully illustrated books were also published after the expedition (Jean-Christophe Jeauffre (2003) (in French). L'expédition Jules Verne à bord du Trois-Mâts Belem. Equinoxe. ISBN 978-2841353521. and Jean-Christophe Jeauffre (2002) (in French). Esquisses d'un voyage Amazonie-Martinique-Açores. Carnets d'ailleurs. Équinoxe. ISBN 9782841353460.).
In 2006, he co-wrote and produced the Jules Verne Adventures TV documentary Explorers: From the Titanic to the Moon, starring producer/director James Cameron and veteran Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. All of the aforementioned films are now being distributed in the US on DVD and Blu-ray with narrations by Christopher Lee and Ernest Borgnine.
The latest expedition he produced and directed for the Mars Institute-NASA is the Northwest Passage Drive (2009–2010): the first motorized crossing of the Arctic Sea. As a writer and a film director, Jeauffre is currently developing a Science Fiction feature film to be produced in Hollywood.
In 2005 Dieudonné and Jean-Christophe Jeauffre founded the American version of the French nonprofit Jules Verne Adventures. It is based in Downtown Los Angeles[4] and maintains an IRS 501(c)3 status. The inaugural American launch of the Los Angeles Jules Verne Festival[5] (October 2006 at the Shrine Auditorium) has celebrated the work of George Lucas,[6] Harrison Ford, Dr. Jane Goodall and James Cameron and attracted 6,300 attendees.
Since its creation, the Jules Verne Festival has honored movie stars, explorers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs year after year, among them Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Charlotte Rampling, Claude Lelouch, Johnny Depp, Christopher Lee, Patrick Stewart, Mark Hamill (Paris), Buzz Aldrin, William Shatner, Tippi Hedren, Stan Lee, Ray Bradbury, Ted Turner, Larry Hagman,[7] Christopher Reeve, Roy E. Disney, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, Steve McQueen,[8] TV series Heroes, Lost and Battlestar Galactica cast and crew (Los Angeles), and has celebrated movie classics such as Blade Runner, Star Trek, Superman, Forbidden Planet, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Some Like It Hot and The Wild Bunch.[9]