Benoît Labourdette

Benoît Labourdette is a filmmaker, educator, researcher, essayist, and consultant on cultural innovation and digital strategies. 

He is also a multidisciplinary artist and president of the agency Benoît Labourdette Production, which creates cultural and digital experiences and develops creative engineering.

He has directed 7 feature-length documentary and experimental fiction films and 400 short films. In 2005, when cameras began appearing in cell phones, he founded the “Pocket Films Festival” in collaboration with the Forum des images, an event that many professionals in the field still credit with shaping their relationship to images and their anthropological reflections on technology. In 2011, he co-founded “La Fête du court métrage” with the CNC, and created the collaborative project “Par ma fenêtre” during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. He produces, writes, and directs fiction films, documentaries, experimental and participatory works, and institutional films in innovative formats. His creative approach is multidisciplinary, engaging in dialogue with the fields of painting, theater, museums, photography, architecture, and music.

For the past thirty years, he has been leading training programs on filmmaking and new media production as part of professional training programs, at film schools such as La Fémis, and at numerous universities. He explores new forms of storytelling linked to technological innovations (digital interactivity, mobile phones, drones, virtual reality, social media, and artificial intelligence).

He provides consulting and professional training to businesses, institutions, and local governments to support their cultural and social innovation strategies. He works at the strategic level on institutional projects, the transformation of cultural policies, and regional dynamics, with a focus on cultural rights. For its clients, it organizes experimental events, training programs, and collective intelligence initiatives, where participatory artistic practice is at the heart of the process.

He works on issues related to health, disability, mental health, and psychosocial skills, in partnership with public institutions and nonprofit organizations (Youth Judicial Protection, DRAC, Cultures du cœur). Together with psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, he founded the “Pocket Films Empathie” training and support program.

He oversees the development of creative and collaborative web platforms, as well as tools for collective intelligence and digital heritage. He designs, coordinates, and supports creative, methodological, and scientific projects involving artificial intelligence (CinémAI at the Centre Pompidou, TUMO x AI at the Forum des images, leading the Forum des images’ AI Monitoring Committee, and outreach projects in the social sector).

He shares a wide range of resources on his website: philosophical essays, teaching methods, accounts of experiences, and proposals for cultural policies. In 2025, he founded BIP Éditions.

Text excerpted from Benoît Labourdette's website.