Claude Andrieux is a French writer-director born in Grenoble in 1956. The world of travel, nature, and wide-open spaces is central to his work.
He is the second of twelve children from a modest background. He directs documentaries for television. The dozens of awards he has won at festivals for his documentaries (filmed in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Himalayas) and his short fiction films for the cinema attest to and highlight the originality and quality of his work as a writer and director.
He filmed his first documentary for television in 1984 in the Himalayas, following a marathon in the mountains of Pakistan. It was the poignant documentary "La montagne à la Folie" (The Mountain Gone Mad), which brought him to prominence. With his camera, he follows five schizophrenics, institutionalized in Charleville-Mézières, who choose a mountain retreat for their holidays. This documentary has garnered over fifteen awards at festivals across Europe. He works for all television channels, with a particular affinity for public service broadcasting and films from distant lands.
Since 1998, Claude Andrieux has worked at Nomade Productions. A producer and director of documentaries, he produced the 2017 documentary *White October* for ARTE and Ushuaia TV, directed by Christophe Raylat, featuring writer Sylvain Tesson on an expedition in the mountains of Tajikistan. In 2018, also for ARTE, he produced *Ural in Pursuit of Autumn* with writer Cedric Gras. Alongside this, he develops projects for feature films and directed his first feature, *Lost Elephants*, the story of two very different men traveling across Iceland to audition for singer Björk. It was released on January 30, 2019.
