Marie Jaoul de Poncheville

Marie Jaoul de Poncheville is French. She studied literature. She began her professional life with children, working as a journalist for Bayard Presse and as art director for a children’s magazine, « Pomme d’Api ».
She was then appointed to the Société Française de Production, in charge of reorganizing the children’s TV programs department, and was also appointed company psychologist.

With the help of her partner François Truffaut, she created her own publishing house 5Continents. It publishes practical and educational books, a collection of foreign literature and a Collection de Cinéma focusing on cinema professions, under the direction of Gilles Jacob.
This collection includes Nestor Almendros’ famous “Un Homme à la Caméra” and, later, Truffaut’s “Corrrespondance”.
In 1984, Marie met the American Tibetologist Professor Richard Kohn who had just filmed a documentary on a Tibetan Buddhist ritual, the Mani Rimdu.
The film, shot in a monastery on the Nepal/Tibet border, has yet to find a distributor, so she helps Richard Kohn finish the film and pre-sells it to Arte.
The film is called ” God of Dance “. The executive producer is Franz-Cristof Giercke.
Once the film was finished, Marie took the crew to Nepal to show the film to the monks at the monastery.

From this experience, she took to the camera herself and made a series of documentaries for French television, recounting, among other things, the dramatic history of the Tibetans.

His first feature film was ” Lungta, les Cavaliers du Vent “, shot in Tibet just after the events of Tien An Men. The film was released theatrically and abroad (USA) in 1990.
The film premiered at the Pagoda in the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and French government ministers of the day.
On this expedition, Marie took along Jane Mathieson, a doctor with Médecins du Monde who published the first report on women’s conditions in Tibet.
Marie wrote a book about this expedition: “Sept femmes au Tibet sur les traces d’Alexandra David-Néel” (Seven women in Tibet in the footsteps of Alexandra David-Néel), published by Albin Michel and translated into German.
The film “Lungta, les Cavaliers du Vent” (The Forgotten Tibet) is released in France and abroad.
In the USA, the film was released with a voice-over by Richard Gere, and in France with the voice of Isabelle Adjani.
The Dalai Lama comes to Paris for the first time and meets President François Mitterrand.

All these years in Nepal and Tibet were marked by Marie’s personal and political commitment to the Tibetan cause: adoption of children, creation of schools in the Solukhumbu (Sherpa region), etc…
Later, Marie directed a documentary for the Thyssen Bornemisza Foundation on “The Hidden Treasures of Buddhist Art” in Buryatia. She is accompanied by Francesca Thyssen-Von Habsbourg (President of this Foundation based in Lugano, Switzerland), Heather Karmay-Stoddart and Anthony Harris.

The following year, she produced “The Return of the Dalai Lama to Russia and Siberia”. She followed the Dalai Lama for over two months in Siberia and Kalmykia, and donated her work to the Buddhist Image Bank: The Meridian Trust.

Molom, Tale of Mongolia

Continuing her research into the history of Tibetan Buddhism, Marie Jaoul de Poncheville decided to make a film in Mongolia from St Petersburg to Ulan Bator, following the journey of a 19th-century Russian Buddhist named Dorjev.
This film obtains the Advance on Receipts. But with insufficient funds, Marie transformed the script and the film’s title became “Molom, Tale of Mongolia”, an initiation film about a child lost on the steppe, abandoned by his father during a wolf hunt.
Taken in hand by a Shaman, Yönden gradually discovers the keys to Knowledge and personal freedom over the course of a long journey.
During the shooting of this film in 1993, Marie was accompanied by Patrick Aeberhard, President of Médecins du Monde. He asked Dr. Alain Cantero to take part in the filming and treat the Nomads.
Doctor Alain Cantero accepted and set up an association to help the Nomads.
He obtains several tons of essential medicines to treat the Mongolian Nomads.
He passes on his knowledge to the Nomads who follow him every year, and who in turn take up the baton. She brought Abderrahmane Sissako, a Mauritanian-Malian filmmaker fresh out of the famous VGIK school in Mongolia, to work as artistic director on the film. As well as Alice de Poncheville and Charles Castella as stage managers, also in charge of the actors.
The film was a great success in France and abroad, particularly in the United States. It won the Best Film Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, the Cannes Junior Prize and the Grand Prize at the Beirut Film Festival. Declared Best Film of the Year by the New York Times.

After the film, Marie wrote ” Molom, le chamane et l’enfant”, published by Editions Lattès. With Abderrahmane Sissako, Marie went on to write and shoot “La Vie sur Terre” in Mali, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako.

Tulum

The following year, she left for Rome to write a screenplay for the Fellini Foundation, “Voyage à Tulum”, inspired by Fellini’s last trip to Mexico in the company of Castaneda.

La Projection (The Projection)

Marie and Abderrahmane both return to Mali to show the film “Life on Earth” to the villagers of Sokolo. Marie films the Projection of Life on Earth, which becomes the Projection she realizes. Marie asked Arte to film Abderrahmane, who returned to Sokolo with his finished film, to show it in his father’s village.
This film is called “The Projection” and is being shown in cinemas at the same time as “Life on Earth”. An article published in Cahiers du cinéma describes this short 26-minute film as a magical moment of true cinema…

Yönden

But Yönden, the little actor from Molom, sends Marie messages asking her to return to Mongolia. How can you resist? Marie leaves and decides to film Yönden, who has just turned 17 and is in charge of driving Alain Cantero’s care caravan across Mongolia.
Marie obtains funding for her project from Arte.

Tengri, the Blue of Heaven

In 2003, she began researching and writing a love story about Kyrgyzstan. She met Jean-François Goyet, and together they pursued the story of Témür, a former Aral Sea sailor, and a young nomad ill-married to an Islamist mercenary. For this film, she traveled extensively in Kyrgyzstan, immersing herself in the country’s traditions for several years. She chose her actors with the help of her translator Natalia Tychinskaya and Charles Castella.
“Tengri, le bleu du ciel” is a Franco-German co-production and will be released in Paris at the end of April 2010. It was selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also selected to represent Kyrgyzstan at the 2008 Hollywood Oscars. The film won numerous awards.

In Praise of the Thistle

In 2015, in collaboration with Charles Castella, Marie produced André Glücksmann, Eloge du Chardon for FR5 in the “Empreintes” collection, to rave reviews.

Today…

Marie is working on four major projects:

– A feature film ” Aux Sources de l’Amour “, the epic story of cellist Lise Barbier-Cristiani, which she began writing in 2008 with Jean-François Goyet.
She sued alone in 2015 This is a true story, set in Siberia in the 19th century. That of Lise Barbier-Cristiani, a young French cellist who set off to pass on her music to the “peoples of Siberia”, an exceptional young woman with a passion for freedom who gave recitals all along her 8,000 km journey to Kamchatka, Petropavlosk and who died of cholera on her return to France at Novotcherkask on the Don. She was 26 years old.

– Elisa“, a young cellist studying at the Paris Conservatoire, falls in love with the story of Lise Barbier-Cristiani and sets off to follow in her footsteps in Russia and modern Siberia.

– Saran et Yona“, two Mongolian sisters, script written with Marie-Hélène Rudel-Gatlif, a feature-length adventure film, a Mongolian western, which reflects a Mongolia struggling in the throes of violent modernity. This will be the third film in his Mongolian trilogy.
This film tells the story of the completely different lives of two sisters raised in a nomadic camp in Arkangai, who have now gone their separate ways.

–Ma Bonne Terre“, a feature film written with Marie-Hélène Rudel-Gatlif, tells the story of a lovesick ethno-anthropologist who returns to her beloved country.

–Voyage à Tulum“, a screenplay written in Italy and documented by the Fellini Foundation, was completed in Paris with the collaboration of Henri Gougaud.
The script is an adaptation of Fellini’s Diary of his last trip to Mexico with Carlos Castaneda.