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Jean-Jacques Annaud

Pioneering French director Jean-Jacques Annaud has often seemed as much anthropologist as filmmaker, taking great pains to faithfully create the disparate cultures that have driven his films. Time after time he has depicted the conflict that occurs when one culture bumps up against another and the resultant emotional transformations that arise from these clashes. His globetrotting has taken him from Vietnam (where he became the first non-Asian in 50 years to shoot anything but live ammunition) to the Andes (substituting for the Himalayas), the Canadian Rockies (standing in for the Andes) to colonial Africa, pursuing a recurrent theme--the quest for humanity in a world that has lost all sense of what being human is.