BIO

Yann les Jours was born in Lyon, France, and lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
He studied Art History and English Literature at Lyon II Lumière University and later attended the Documentary Summer School at the Locarno Film Festival and the Ji.hlava IDFF Academy.
His documentary work—spanning film, music videos, and performance—is often described as poetic, abstract, and experimental. 

His debut short film, Repetitions, had its world premiere in 2022 at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

In 2023–24, Yann created three short experimental documentaries, each structured around a distinct poetic form:
Mars (a haiku), premiered at Short Waves Poznań in the RAW Competition (2023).
kindergarten (a villanelle), premiered at 20minmax Ingolstadt ISFF (2023).
Both films were later selected for L'Alternativa Film Festival at CCCB Barcelona in 2024, where kindergarten won the award for Best International Short Film.
Sonnet (a sonnet), premiered at ShorTS IFF in Trieste, Italy (June 2025) and won the awards for Best Director and Best Sound Design at the Indy Film Library Experimental Showcase 2025, Amsterdam, NL.

2025 also saw the premieres of Fireworks (Les Instants Vidéo, Marseille), The Hedgehog (Riga IFF), My name is Renata, she says (Côté Court, Pantin), and Happiness (FLIGHT, Genoa).

STATEMENT

When I was 20 I became a dancer. When I was 30 I became a producer for dance and theatre.
Like any producer I was broke before the end of the productions. But instead of asking some cinema students to film our shows for free (a common practice), I started filming them and editing them myself…

That was my cinema school.