David Dufresne

Quick bio

David Dufresne is a French filmmaker, writer and journalist. His new feature documentary, Mano Negra: Bring the Noise, will have its world premiere at the 2026 Rome Film Festival. A music critic on the alternative rock scene of the 1980s, Dufresne crossed paths with Mano Negra many times during the band’s rise. Decades later, after reconnecting with Manu Chao in Barcelona, he wrote New Moon, café de nuit joyeux (2017), an account of the legendary Paris club, and directed Le Pigalle (2019), a people’s history of the neighbourhood that features Mano Negra on their 1989 tour of the district. Bring the Noise brings that long story full circle. His first feature documentary, Un pays qui se tient sage (The Monopoly of Violence), was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight in 2020, won the Lumières Award for Best Documentary and was nominated for the César for Best Documentary in 2021. Before that, Dufresne was one of the pioneers of interactive documentary. Prison Valley (2010, with Philippe Brault), a web documentary on the prison industry in Cañon City, Colorado, won the World Press Photo Award, was selected at IDFA and led to a two-year fellowship at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. He followed it with Fort McMoney (2013), a documentary game set in the Alberta oil sands, produced with the National Film Board of Canada and ARTE, selected at IDFA and presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Both works have become reference points in the history of the form. He is also the author of a dozen books, including the investigative Tarnac, magasin général (Assises du journalisme prize, 2012, hailed by Le Monde as “a small masterpiece”) and the novel Dernière Sommation (2019). His investigation into police violence, Allo Place Beauvau, earned him the Grand Prix des Assises internationales du journalisme in 2019 and was cited by the UN, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. In 2020 he founded Au Poste, an independent, ad-free media outlet funded entirely by its audience.

Today, David lives in Paris.