Jean-Jacques Péché

It is to the filmmaker André Delvaux that Jean-Jacques Péché, born in 1936 in Brussels, owes the discovery of cinema, a relatively new art form for the time, which would play a decisive role in his life. As a teenager, he studied at the Athénée Fernand Blum in Brussels, where André Delvaux was a Dutch teacher at the time. This encounter led many of the school’s students to an exceptional film club for the time: the Ecran du Séminaire des Arts, where they met personalities as rich and diverse as André Thirifays, Jacques Ledoux, Paul Davay, René Micha, Henri d’Ursel and Dimitri Balachoff, all of whom would later create the Brussels Film Museum.

While André Delvaux’s reputation gradually acquired an international dimension, Jean-Jacques Péché continued his studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he obtained a degree in physical sciences in 1961. During his studies, he took part in the Film and Cinema Seminars organised by the Solvay Institute of Sociology. It was through these seminars that he met the founding group of the future INSAS (Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle): André Delvaux, Jean Brismée, Ghislain Cloquet, Suzanne Baron, Paul Davay, Jean-Claude Batz, Raymond Ravar and many others.

Jean-Jacques Péché, a senior secondary school teacher, has been a science teacher since 1962. However, he quickly returned to his former love and joined RTBF, the Belgian radio and television station of the French community, in 1964.
Assistant to the filmmakers André Delvaux for “Le temps des écoliers” (1962) and Jean Brismée for “Monsieur Plateau” (1964), “André Vésale” and “Les progestatifs de synthèse”, Jean-Jacques Péché also made his first short fiction film in 1964, entitled “Un vieux”, with Willy Kurant as director of photography and the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat as editor. In the same year, the film won the First Work Prize and the Social Film Prize at the Antwerp Film Festival.

He then embarked, with journalist Pierre MANUEL, on a television series called FAITS DIVERS, which soon became a great national and international success. The thirty or so social documentaries they made were regularly awarded prizes in numerous festivals (see filmography) and in 1975 they were awarded the Grand Prix de la Critique in Belgium.
Attached to the Department of Information at RTBF, Jean-Jacques Péché is also involved in co-production collaborations with the famous Swiss magazine “Temps Présent”, founded by Claude Torracinta at TSR (Télévision Suisse Romande) in Geneva. The director also participates, with the anthropologist Jean-Paul COLLEYN, in ethnographic films in the series “Planet of Men”. He has also made several forays into fiction cinema, as well as three television films, all of which will be crowned on the international scene.

Alongside his work as a television director, Jean-Jacques Péché taught documentary filmmaking at INSAS for 15 years and was finally called to the committee of the Rencontres Internationales de Télévision d’Aix-en-Provence, along with some of the great names in French television, including Claude Santelli, Jacques Krier, Maurice Failevic, Claude Otzenberger, Jean-Emile Jeanneson and Jean-Claude Bringuier.

In 2002, together with several Belgian filmmakers, including Jean-Jacques Andrien, Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Yasmine Kassari and Gérald Frydman, he founded the ARRF (Association des Réalisateurs et Réalisatrices de Films Francophones), which he served as its secretariat until 2004.

In 2013, he directed the documentary “Réenchanter le monde” for the Conservatoire Royal de Liège, which brings together the Argentine conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Grande Région around the music of Astor Piazzolla (broadcast on RTBF 2014).

Jean-Jacques Péché eventually left RTBF as part of the Horizon 97 plan (early retirement of the company’s statutory staff). The filmmaker then devoted himself entirely to the projects of his small production company ORBAT Films and continued to teach, until 2015, documentary cinema at the Haute Ecole Libre de Bruxelles, the HELB-PRIGOGINE. Since 2016, he leads a documentary workshop at the summer academy of Neufchâteau, the AKDT.

At the beginning of 2017, the CINEMATEK (Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique) is organising a retrospective of eleven films from the Faits Divers series.