Yann Le Masson died on January 20. The director of «Kashima Paradise» (1973), a monument of direct cinema showing Japanese farmers fighting against the construction of Tokyo airport, died on his houseboat. This great-hearted adventurer, a mariner in Europe, a teacher of optics in Cuba, a political activist, was a great chief operator for John Frankenheimer, Sydney Pollack and Michel Audiard.
Committed documentary filmmaker, his main films have shown the current events that become History: a look and a method that have profoundly marked the 7th art. Like «Sucre amer» (1963), the first European film to follow an election campaign on the spot, that of Michel Debré in La Réunion; in another «J'ai huit ans» (1961), in the middle of the Algerian war. He always lived as close as possible to those he filmed: the truest way of speaking in the world.