Pierre-Paul Renders

Born in 1963 in Brussels, Pierre-Paul Renders graduated in classical philology at the Université catholique de Louvain and earned a diploma in directing (Institut des arts de diffusion [IAD], Louvain-la-Neuve). Having left the IAD, he and his five classmates started a production company (AA Belgians Films). They created their first collective feature film, with a very Belgian surrealist style, Les sept péchés capitaux (1992), based on which Renders created the short film La Tendresse. After a brief detour with television and documentaries (mainly for Doctors Without Borders), he directed Thomas est amoureux (2001), his first feature film, with a screenplay by Philippe Blasband. A unique piece that's difficult to categorize, the film received awards  at film festivals in Venice, Montreal, Angers, Gerardmer, Paris, Espoo (Finland) and Buenos Aires. In collaboration with Denis Lapière he wrote Comme tout le monde, a script that was simultaneously turned into a romantic comedy (Khalid Maadour, Caroline Dhavernas, Thierry Lhermitte, Chantal Lauby et al., 2006) and a graphic novel (illustrated by Rudy Spiessert and published in 2007 by Dupuis). In 2006, he created the concept for the series Alter Ego (Dupuis/Europe Comics, 2015) and presented it to Denis Lapière. In recent years he has been writing and directing workshops for students at the IAD, and he also runs courses for film actors and does the odd bit of script-doctoring. He also does a comics column for the Journal du Médecin, a magazine for general practitioners and specialists.