Galatée Films is a French film production company with its headquarters at 92, rue Jouffroy d’Abbans, in the 17th district of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe. The company bears the stamp of its CEO, Jacques Perrin, a free man who steadfastly rejects routine.

Jacques Perrin first became known to French and international mainstream audiences as an actor. He owed his first main roles to the Italian director, Valerio Zurlini, who won the Golden Lion in Venice for his movie Family Diary. Acclaimed in Italy , Jacques Perrin went on to play more and more exacting roles there under directors Vittorio de Seta and Mauro Bolognini. Before long, a variety of other, very dissimilar film directors including Pierre Schoendoerffer, Costa Gavras, Jacques Ruffio and Jacques Demy were casting him in their films, in which he came to epitomize the young romantic lead—army lieutenant, Prince Charming or dashing young sailor—for a whole generation of movie-goers.

But fame did not go to his head, nor diminish his determination to “do the things he likes.” At the age of only 27, he started up his own production company and caused a sensation with Z, a film produced in partnership with Algeria , directed by Costa Gavras and starring such celebrity actors as Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant and François Périer. Z was a worldwide hit and won the Hollywood Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This was the start of a fruitful working partnership with Costa Gavras, with whom Jacques Perrin produced State of Siege (1973) about the Tupamaros in Latin America and Special Section (1975) about the special tribunals set up in France during World War Two.

The subjects he picks are bold but he always puts quality first. In 1970 he produced a romantic medieval drama, Blanche, by Polish director Walerian Borowczyk starring Michel Simon, followed by a courageous documentary directed by Yves Courrière and Philippe Monnier, The Algerian War, which raised an intense debate in France . He produced another montage documentary, The Spiral, in 1974, this time about Chile , a film that endeavors to figure out what happened between the election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile on September 4th, 1970 , and his assassination on September 11th, 1973.

Free-spirited, brave and idealistic, Jacques Perrin has never balked at the years of work demanded by certain film projects. At the same time, he refuses to listen to talk of “unreasonable” projects. If a film becomes a mainstream hit, so much the better, but first and foremost, Jacques Perrin follows his heart. This led him to win his second Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1976 with Black and White in Color, a film with a deliberately philosophical storyline directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, who was an up-and-coming advertising filmmaker at the time. He followed this in 1977 with The Desert of the Tartars, adapted from a bleak, angst-ridden novel by Dino Buzzati, with a star-studded cast including Vittorio Gassman, Philippe Noiret, Laurent Terzieff, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Max von Sydow. The movie left him with debts but a great deal of pride and won the Grand Prize for French Cinema.

Over the next few years he produced numerous films of widely different styles and inspirations: Adoption, directed by Marc Grunebaum in 1978; The Roaring Forties by Christian de Chalonge in 1981, The Monkey Folk by Gérard Vienne in 1988; Médecins des hommes (six episodes produced for television) also in 1988; Out of Life, a film about the war in Lebanon directed by Maroun Bagdadi in 1990 (winner of the Cannes Festival Jury Prize); Guelwaar, about African identity and its rejection of first-world compassion, directed in 1992 by Ousmane Sembene; Erythrée, 30 ans de solitude, a documentary by Didier Martiny about the civil war in Eritrea; two more documentaries, Espérance and D Day, produced for the Caen Peace Memorial in 1994; The Children of Lumière about the history of French cinema in 1995... The list goes on.

His irrepressible appetite for producing unconventional movies triumphed yet again in 1996 when Microcosmos, a spectacular big-screen documentary film about insects directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, was an instant smash hit in cinemas worldwide and went on to garner a slew of international prizes. In France alone it won five César awards, including that for Best Producer.

Jacques Perrin’s interest in the very special domain of wildlife films dates back to 1983, when he invited Gérard Vienne, director of The Territory of Others and The Claw and the Tooth, to direct his production of The Monkey Folk, a movie that investigates the ancestral mythology of mankind. The result, an exuberant saga devoid of anthropomorphic artificiality, was released in cinemas in 1988 and accompanied by a 12-part television series.

Also in 1988, he commenced his latest production, The Traveling Birds, about birds migrating around the world. In this film, true to his principle that “all living creatures without exception, plants, animals and humans, belong to one single, gigantic family tree,” Jacques Perrin turns himself into a bird in order to see the planet more clearly, from the viewpoint of a free creature who “scoffs at our tight little national boundaries.” To make the film, Jacques Perrin took his cameras all over the world, from the Arctic to Patagonia and from Japan to New Zealand . He chose Libya as his partner to present the approach to the African continent and the crossing of the world’s most beautiful desert.

The Traveling Birds is a hymn to nature. Before it, Jacques Perrin produced the sublimely beautiful Himalaya , l’enfance d’un chef (a.k.a. Caravan), directed by the adventurer/photographer Eric Valli, about the daily life of an aging Buddhist village chief in the remote Dolpo region of Nepal . The film came out in 1999 and was hailed for its beauty and authenticity. A worldwide hit, it was nominated for the 2000 Oscars.

For ten years, Jacques Perrin also produced and presented a weekly TV show, La 25ème heure, screened nationwide on the France 2 channel. This high-quality show was very popular with audiences and critics alike.

Dubbed “the white knight of French film production” by film critic Danièle Heymann, Jacques Perrin never looks back. “My life consists of projects,” he says. “I run after them and build them. Cinema is the third eye that never sleeps.”