Jérôme Le Maire

Biography

Jérôme le Maire is a Belgian filmmaker who graduated from the Institut des arts de diffusion (IAD) in 1995. After directing short films (Meilleurs Vœux, Salutations distinguées) and early documentaries (Volter ne m'intéresse pas, Un jour, une vie), he gained international acclaim with several key feature films.

​His 2006 feature documentary, Where is Love in the Palm Grove? (Où est l'amour dans la palmeraie ?), was shot over two years in southern Morocco to explore love and relationships, screening at over 30 festivals including Visions du Réel and RIDM. In 2011, he released The Grand Tour (Le Grand'Tour), a fiction feature co-written with Vincent Solheid about a group of friends whose weekend trip turns into a six-month odyssey, which was selected at Rotterdam and Cannes (ACID) and won the Amphore d'Or at the Groland Film Festival.

​He returned to Morocco for Tea or Electricity (Le Thé ou l'Électricité, 2012), an award-winning documentary following the arrival of electricity in a remote High Atlas village. The film won the Magritte for Best Documentary in 2013 and received a nomination at the European Film Awards. In 2016, he released Burning Out (Dans le ventre de l'hôpital), a Belgian-French-Swiss co-production tackling workplace burnout in hospitals, which premiered at IDFA and won the 2018 Magritte for Best Documentary.