Helena Michie grew up in Kent, England, and after some travelling settled in the Languedoc Roussillon area of southern France. In 1991 she founded the Association La Belle Auriole, based in an old Catalan farmhouse where she lived with her two children, developing over the next fifteen years an independent international artists' and writers' retreat there and a partnership with UNESCO, as well as curating cultural events. During this period the British poet John Fairfax encouraged her to write and publish her poems and to make her first film - The Camp at Rivesaltes, The Final Day - which gives a voice to those people who suffered and died in a nearby, now abandoned, concentration camp, through a poem translated into different languages. This was screened at the Montreal World Film Festival, amongst others, as well as at the Imperial War Museum, London. In 2012 it joined Radio Canada's International Passport series. Having attended its screening, Jeanne Pope invited her to Montreal in 2011, where she made a short video to celebrate the Montreal Premiere screening of Dust: A Sculptor's Journey at the Cinema ExCentris (YouTube). Having fallen in love with the city, she returned in 2012 and shot footage for Chez Lise during one of Jeanne's visits. Helena's second film, about the Catalan painter Jean Capdeville, from Ceret, who died in 2011, is due for completion at the end of 2013. She currently lives in the winemaking village of Fitou.

Films

2009: The Camp at Rivesaltes. The Final Day/ Le Dernier Jour a Rivesaltes (Doc) Director - Writer - Producer. 25 mins  Montreal World Film Festival. Imperial War Museum, London. Radio Canada - International Passport.

2011: Montreal Premiere of Dust: A Sculptor's Journey by Jeanne Pope. Video. 8 mins. Youtube

PROJECTS 2015

JEAN: doc in Post-Production