PAUL MÉNAGÉ
Paul has tackled many challenges along the way. As a dyspraxic child, he faced serious difficulties with regard to academic learning. Theater became a space for him to liberate himself and communicate.
After that came the magic tricks: by filming the ones he learnt, he found himself a new passion for cinema. At the time, he also gathered a team of friends to film his videos and discovered the pleasure of teamwork.
He began modestly, being hired as an extra in the movie “Elle” by Paul Verhoeven. He then studied at the ESRA (Superior School of Audiovisual Production) in Paris.
In the meantime, he started to write his first short film and created his own company, “Les films à Paul”.
« WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE » has since earned many accolades. It was selected in the catalog of short films of the Cannes Film Festival, the “Short Film Corner“, and was rewarded in Milan at the MIFF Awards 2018, winning the prize for the best international short film 0-15. It also won the prize for the best actor at the Method Fest Independent Film Festival in Beverly Hills; award winning at the Milledgeville festival, in Georgia (USA) for best international short film and best cinematography.
Paul begins a collaboration with fashion artistic director Candice Lewin.
They sign together about thirty films for various designers and jewelers.
Her second short film “Words to my Love”, made in 2021, is a free adaptation of the poem “Paroles à l’Amie” that Renée Vivien wrote in 1906.
It is a tribute to this romantic poet, object of contempt and misogynistic disdain, because she was a lesbian, at the forefront of the feminist fight for the emancipation of women.
This film is part of a collection project: “COMBATS”, which will be composed of 6 other films. Each will be adapted from an “activists” poem, denouncing oppression, contempt, exploitation, violence…
He also developed the project of two feature films.
A fantastic tale, co-written with Franck Van Leeuwen, which evokes the complex relationships between nature and man.
The second feature film is an intrusion into the fantasy world of a young woman trying to survive, overwhelmed by all the suffering she has suffered since childhood.