Long before he was accepting an Oscar, Michel Gondry was the young director that Björk and the Rolling Stones trusted with their music videos. This 2023 documentary, directed by François Nemeta, traces how a self-taught tinkerer from a family of instrument makers became one of pop culture's most inventive image-makers.
What is Michel Gondry: Do it Yourself! about?
The film follows Gondry's path from music-video auteur to feature filmmaker, built around the stop-motion tricks, handmade sets, and cardboard-and-tape ingenuity that made his work instantly recognisable. Interviews with collaborators and family, including Olivier Gondry, François Gondry, and Marie-Noëlle Gondry, sit alongside musicians who worked with him, among them Étienne Charry, Tom Rowlands, Thomas Bangalter, and Jack White. Rather than a chronological résumé, the documentary treats Gondry's career as a single continuous experiment, showing how the same do-it-yourself instincts that shaped his earliest promos carried through to his award-winning feature work. It is as much a portrait of a working method as of a person: an argument that limitation, not budget, produced his signature style.
About the cast
The documentary draws its testimony from people who watched Gondry work up close. Family members Olivier, François, and Marie-Noëlle Gondry offer a home-side view, while musicians Étienne Charry, Tom Rowlands, Thomas Bangalter, and Jack White speak to what it was like collaborating with him on set. Gondry himself narrates much of his own story on camera.
Context & significance
Made in Italy and released in 2023, the film arrives as part of a broader wave of documentaries reassessing music-video directors as serious visual artists in their own right. Gondry's reputation rests on videos for major international pop and rock acts before his pivot to cinema, and this film is explicit about treating that period as the foundation of everything that followed, not a warm-up act to it.
Watching Michel Gondry: Do it Yourself! on Ktime
Michel Gondry: Do it Yourself! streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the interviews and narration in full. Watching only requires a free K-Time account login, and the site's Farsi-language interface makes browsing and queuing documentaries like this one straightforward for the Iranian diaspora audience.