SIMON BROOK, Director

Simon Brook was born in London and was educated in Paris and London. He started working as a runner at Pinewood at the age of twelve on various film productions. After training for a year as an actor at the London Drama Center, he moved to Paris where he worked as a Company Manager for the European tours of Pina Bausch, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and the Murray Louis Dance Company. He then spent a few years in New York and Los Angeles, working on Jim Jarmusch's film Down By Law, music videos with Academy Award winning director Zbigniew Rybczinsky and on Philip Kaufman's Unbearable Lightness of Being.

He established Black Cat Productions in New York, producing TV drama, music videos and shorts. In 1988 he was associate producer on the movie Religion, INC starring Sandra Bullock. Since his return to France, he has been directing documentaryies and drama, including the J.G. Ballard story Minus One, and Alice by Saki, released theatrically on 90 screens with Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre.

His many films include 20 short films about children in Caucasus, a documentary on the Amazon River for France 2, a documentary about the Karo tribe of Ethiopia for Canal+ and the documentary Brook by Brook, coproduced by the Dardenne brothers. He also made a film on Alexandria in the time of Cleopatra for Discovery and a musical documentary in the Amazon, Jungle Magic, for the BBC and ARTE. In 2006, he directed The True Legend of the Eiffel Tower a ninety minute docudrama for Canal+ and France 3 (with record ratings and the highest audience appreciation, beating The March of the Penguins). In 2008 he directed the documentary Generation 68, a humorous offbeat look at the 1968 uprisings, commented upon 40 years later by Dennis Hopper, Milos Forman, Mary Quant, Vaclav Havel, Jean-Claude Carriere, Ed Ruscha and more.

More recently he produced and directed Annie Nightingale: Bird on the Wireless, a one-hour primetime musical documentary with Paul McCarthey and Mick Jones (of the Clash) for the BBC. Simon just completed a 90-minute documentary Indian Summer, a medical road movie about Ayurvedia medicine.