© Laurent Demartini
Joseph Paris is a filmmaker. His practice moves from a documentary terrain traversed by experimental cinema to an experimental cinema that inhabits theatre and museums.
In 2008, he co-founded the collective Kassandre, combining formal and legal experimentation around free licensing. His first documentary, Naked War (2014), deciphers the cinematographic grammar of Femen's actions and shows how the activists managed to turn the mechanics of the society of the spectacle against itself. The Flag (2024), released in cinemas, exposes how the semantic violence carried by certain political discourses extends into erosions of the rule of law.
Since 2022, he has been developing a feature film in Ukraine that questions the place military images have come to occupy in our daily lives, confronting the hold of the military apparatus over documentary images in wartime. In parallel, he conducts research with writer Joanna Dunis and sound artist Alejandro Van Zandt-Escobar, exploring points of encounter between text, sound and image.
He worked for Raoul Peck on Exterminate All The Brutes (HBO) and directed to die gracefully, twenty-four hours of improvised cinema broadcast live.
He maintains a long-standing collaboration with theatre director Benjamin Lazar: La lame et le pinceau (Louvre Museum, 2025), The Night of Hieroglyphs (Institut de France), Heptaméron (Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord), Maldoror (Athénée-Théâtre Louis Jouvet), The Forest of Masks, a film exhibited at the Musée d'art moderne de Paris as part of the exhibition Toyen (2022).
For 2025–2026, he serves as documentary delegate at the French Directors Guild (SRF).