Isidore Bethel is a filmmaker and educator. His directorial debut Liam received the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival’s Jury Prize in 2018 and is streaming on Tënk. His second film as director Acts of Love premiered at Hot Docs, appeared on MovieWeb’s list of top LGBTQ+ films of 2021, and is streaming on Here TV and Canal+. Films Isidore has edited, written, or produced include What We Leave Behind, Of Men and War, Hummingbirds, and “Some Kind of Intimacy.” Those and others in his filmography have screened at Cannes, SXSW, and Sundance London as well as on POV, Op-Docs, the Criterion Channel, MUBI, and Netflix. They’ve received over 40 awards, including a BIFA and Grand Prizes at IDFA and in the Berlinale’s Generation section; Mexican Academy, European Film Academy, Independent Spirit, and Gotham Award nominations; and Vimeo Staff, IndieWire, and New York Times Critic’s Picks. Support for those films has come from the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, IDA, SFFILM, Doc Society, The Whickers, Catapult, and France’s CNC and Mexico’s IMCINE film boards. Isidore has been a juror for the Paris LGBTQ+ and Chicago International Film Festivals, as well as one of DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” and Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
A graduate of Harvard, the École Normale Supérieure, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Isidore has been an artist-in-residence with the Institut Français, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as a guest artist at UT Austin, Oxford, and Yale. He has mentored filmmakers through programs such as the Aristoteles Workshop in Romania, Stone Soup’s filmmaking classes for preteens, and Doc Amazonie Caraïbe in French Guiana. Films he has accompanied as a consultant or mentor have received prizes at the Venice Critics’ Week, SXSW, and the Independent Spirit Awards. He is a US and French citizen and has taught at France’s national film school La Fémis, Sarah Lawrence College, and Parsons in Paris. His full CV is here.
He’s available for free feedback sessions with filmmakers who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, neurodiverse, and/or LGBTQ+ as well as with others.
Select press:
– Production Hub interview about creative collaboration
– Filmmaker profile for the “25 New Faces of Independent Film”
– Talkhouse essay comparing teaching and filmmaking