Claire Billet

Biography

Claire Billet is a writer and director interested in the consequences of conflicts and wars, particularly in Afghanistan, where she has worked since 2005. She collaborates with Arte, France TV, France 24, XXI magazine, Ouest-France, and others. She has won several awards, including the 2015 Mediterranean Short Film Prize and the 2016 Figra Grand Prix (under 40 minutes category). She was a freelance correspondent in Pakistan and then Afghanistan from 2007 to 2012. Since 2012, she has traveled the world telling the stories of women and men caught in the storms of history. She defines her work thus: "I spend time in conflict zones to immerse myself in personal stories that highlight the complexity and gray areas of war. The formats vary from documentary films to books, from long-form articles to audiovisual installations, depending on the narrative forms that interest me." » In 2015, she and Olivier Jobard directed "Like a Rain of Perfume," the clandestine odyssey of five young Afghan men seeking to reach an inaccessible Europe. Blending harsh realities and fantasies, successes and failures, to the frantic pace of constant uncertainty, their journey was shared for more than six months by directors Olivier Jobard and Claire Billet. Over the course of 12,000 kilometers, the viewer is invited to enter their private lives to better understand their concerns. They also produced an exhibition from it: "The Odyssey of Wandering." Her collaboration with Olivier Jobard, "You Will Be Swedish, My Daughter" (2017), is once again a documentary about exile: Ahmad and Jihane, a Syrian refugee couple, tell their youngest child, Sally, the story of their exile in Sweden. This was followed by several documentaries that deciphered the relentless spiral that led countries to sink into an inextricable powder keg: Afghanistan, Iran, the Central African Republic, and more. In 2025, she directed the documentary "Algérie sections armes spéciales" with historian Christophe Lafaye on a subject never before seen on television: the use of chemical weapons by the French army during the Algerian War. Combining military archives, testimonies from French and Algerian veterans, and the expertise of researchers, it reveals how these weapons were used to destroy the bases of the Algerian resistance as well as civilians in mountain caves.