Olivier Morel, Ph.D., is a French and American director of documentary films and radio series, as well as a teacher. He has been living in the US since 2005, teaching French and comparative literature at the University of Notre Dame.
Much of his previous work has focused on the relationship between trauma and history, trauma and creation. He has worked on the remembrances and accounts of survivors, particularly from the Holocaust and World War I. In 2004 he participated in a film project and contributed to a video installation for Paris' Mémorial de la Shoah and the city of Paris, based on 60 interviews with Holocaust survivors. He has also done work with survivors of World War I: over the course of ten years—from 1997 to 2007—he collected the accounts of the last WWI survivors across the world. He published several works, including a book and photos, and three documentary films: The Twentieth Century, three survivors (French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel) - The Last from World War I (French History Channel) and Farewell 14 (French public television "France 2").
In the U.S., Olivier has spent over three years working on the feature-length documentary (94 minutes) On The Bridge that he had initially developed while taking photographs.
Photo by Jean-Gabriel Leynaud
Photos & texts © Olivier Morel, all rights reserved | Website design by Kirsten Blazic and Olivier Morel | A Zadig Productions/Arte-France film, 2011 | Acknowledgements