Aspiration

Stéphane Mandelkern

Stéphane Mandelkern is 59 and lives in Paris, France. Engineer by training, he made his career in a french big company. Hence, he is self-taught in cinema. Very young, he was influenced by his father, who was involved in a commission dedicated to select films to obtain a financial aid. There were plenty of scripts in the family apartment that aroused his curiosity and he decided to make movies. It started at the age of 13, thanks to a Super8mm camera that had been offered to him. Each summer holidays during a couple of years, he made spy movies with his brothers and cousins. That is how he started to experience with directing and image and sound editing. Then, during 20 years, his interested turned to photography he practiced in black and white. He improved himself in framing and mastering the light, But he kept making films from time to time, like in 1991 « Dunkirk », a documentary realized for a student concourse he won. This is in 2015, that he seriously restarted to make movies, first of all, by realizing “Looking for Kim Novak”, a 45 minutes film in tribute to Kim Novak, to Alfred Hitchcock and to the American cinema of the fifties. It was seen by around 500 people, family and friends, in theaters and home cinemas. In 2018, he made two short films : the first one, “Victoire” (1min) for the Mobile Film Festival and the second one, “The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills” (4min), a poetic drama. After the Covid-19 pandemic that prevented him from making films, he made in 2024 the poetic drama “Aspiration” (4min 32sec) that has been selected in different festivals. Now he is working on new projects of short films, some of them in relation with dance, that is his other passion. He is the CEO of the production society West By Northwest dedicated to his owns films.