Riad Sattouf (in Arabic رياض سطوف) is a French writer and cartoonist comics and film director of Syrian origin (born in Paris, France on 5 May 1978). He is best known for his weekly comics in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo entitled La vie secrète des jeunes and for his award winning film Les Beaux Gosses (The French Kissers).
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The French-Syrian Riad Sattouf born in Paris spent his childhood in Algeria, Libya and Syria, but returned to France to spend his adolescence in Brittany, where he studied in Rennes. An avid reader of cartoon books and periodicals, sent to him by his grandmother, he was fascinated by them. Although he was studying to become a pilot, he applied to study at École Pivaut and then Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image to study animation. The famous cartoonist Olivier Vatine noticed his talent and introduced him to Guy Delcourt who was the owner of a cartoon Delcourt Publishing House specializing in cartoons that published his first book Petit Verglas based on a story line by Éric Corbeyran.
In a unique personal and humorous style, he narrated his own adolescent life observations in Manuel du puceau and Ma Circoncision published by Bréal Jeunesse Publishing House owned by Joann Sfar. The books were later reprinted by L'Association Publishing House. In Ma circoncision, he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act, superimposed on the context of the socio-political life in his ancestral Syria in the 1980s.[1]
He then published the Jérémie series in the cartoon collection Poisson Pilote published by Dargaud, resulting in three books of the series. Jérémie was the story of a young sentimental and unstable youth growing to adulthood and was very autobiographical, also appearing in No sex in New York in 2004 upon the initiative of the French left-wing daily Libération.
In 2005 he published Retour au collège which was a big success. Encouraged by this, Riad Sattouf created the very macho et ambivalent character Pascal Brutal.
Since 2004, he has been publishing a weekly feature in the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo entitled "La vie secrète des jeunes", recounting real life anectodes. Series were republished in two volumes, one in 2007 and the other in 2010.
Riad Sattouf also experimented with film dubbing by giving his voice to a cartoon character in Petit Vampire designed by his friend and cartoonist Joann Sfar.[2]
Moving into actual filmmaking, he directed his first film entitled Les Beaux Gosses (also known by its English title The French Kissers). It was released on 10 June 2009 with great success in France and 1 million viewers in just 2 months. In it, Sattouf portrays the love life and coming of age through adolescence. The film was nominated to three César Awards in 2010: Best Debut Film, Best New Male Actor (for Vincent Lacoste in the role of Hervé) and Best Supporting Actress (for her role as Hervé's mother). It won the Gold Prize for Best Film Debut, Best Male Revelation for Vincent Lacoste and Anthony Sonigo, Best French Revelation for Direction and Production for Sattouf himself and the Jacques Prévert Prize for Best Scenario and Best Adaptation with his co-writer Marc Syrigas.