Yannick Bellon (1924–2019)

Marie-Annick Bellon, known as Yannick Bellon, was born in Biarritz, a daughter of French photojournalist Denise Hulmann Bellon and her husband Jacques Bellon, a magistrate. Her younger sister Loleh Bellon became an award-winning actress and playwright. At age 21, after two years at the Centre artistique et technique des jeunes du cinéma (Artistic and Technical Center for Young Cinema) in Nice, during the Nazi Occupation in World War II, she spent a year at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC, now called La Femis) in Paris, where she was a classmate of Alain Resnais. In 1947, she directed her first film, Goémons, on the harsh lives of seaweed gatherers on the small island of Béniguet off Brittany. Censored for export by French authorities on the pretext that it gave a negative impression of France, it nevertheless won the Grand International Prize for Documentary at the Venice International Film Festival later that year. She directed short films, documentaries, and television programs before making the transition to feature films in 1972 with Quelque part quelqu'un (Somewhere, Someone), starring her sister Loleh. She continued to make provocative films, many with a feminist point of view, into the 1980s. Her films explored subjects such as divorce, breast cancer, and the effects of rape on a young woman and her family. In 2001, she collaborated with the experimental French director Chris Marker on Le Souvenir d'un avenir (Remembrance of Things to Come), a documentary film about her globe-trotting mother’s photographs chronicling the years 1935 to 1955, two decades critical in world politics.