Biography
Jean Boué was born in Hamburg in 1961, where he studied business administration, art history and African studies. Formative for his later career was a trip as a traveling salesman, which he undertook in the mid-1980s through the Eastern European countries of the Comecon economic alliance. While there, he attended the International Festival of Red Cross and Health Films in the Bulgarian port city of Varna, which fueled his passion for documentaries. He made his first own short film in 1988 with the three-minute "Bohemian Balls" (CZ/DE).
After graduating, Boué began working for television in 1989. While working as a freelancer in the editorial department of the satirical program "Extra Drei" at NDR in the early 1990s, Boué had a landmark encounter: he met the legendary documentary filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn, who worked as an editor at NDR and encouraged him to make his own short films for the station. For one of his first works, the seven-minute reportage "Neuschwanstein" (1993), Boué was awarded the Prix ITB.
As a writer and director, Boué made TV documentaries and reports at the time that focused on the relationship between East and West and the changes in Eastern Europe, from the fall of the Wall to the disappearance of the Iron Curtain. Among his films focusing on these topics are the Grimme Award-nominated "Willkommen in Deutschland" (1992), "Kalter Friede - Winter in Moskau" (1994) and his first feature-length documentary "In Spanien wird man brauner" (1995). Making these films, he drew not least on experiences from his above-mentioned journey through Eastern Europe. In collaboration with Bulgarian director Georgi "Jacky" Stoev, Boué accompanied the return of Bulgarian King Simeon I to his homeland in 1996 after 50 years of exile. For the documentaries "Schützenfest" and "Heringstage" he received another nomination for the Grimme Award in 1997.
In 2000, Jean Boué founded the production company JABfilm. While he had previously worked almost exclusively for NDR, he now made numerous films for ARD, ZDF and ARTE. In the reportage series "Weinprobe" (2004-2005) he presented European wine regions, for the ARTE series "Mein Leben" (2003-2009) he made documentary portraits about personalities such as Niki Lauda, Konstantin Wecker, Cornelia Funke and Peter Zadek. The documentary "Kennzeichen Kohl" ("Being Kohl", 2009), in which Boué portrays five men of different origins who share the same name as former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, received much attention.
In 2011, Boué was one of the directors of the award-winning mammoth project "20 × Brandenburg." In the same year, together with Antje Boehmert and Christian Popp, he founded the production company Docdays Productions in Berlin, where he was managing director and shareholder until 2017. The film he produced, "Mein Name ist Khadija" ("My Name is Khadija", 2015, directed by Katja Fedulova), was nominated for the Grimme Award in 2016. Boué's own directorial works of these years include the Iggy Pop portrait "Call Me Iggy" (2012) and "Refugee 11" (2017), about a soccer team in Germany whose players come from 15 countries in Africa and the Middle East. For this film he received the CIVIS - Europe's Media Award for Integration.
Boué won his second Grimme Award for the TV documentary "Die Unerhörten - Über den Landtagswahlkampf in der Prignitz" (2019). The following year, he presented "Die letzten Reporter" (2020) at the Independent FilmFest Osnabrück, in which he portrays three local journalists. The film was theatrically released in the summer of 2021.
In addition to his work as a director, writer and producer, Jean Boué has also been a lecturer at the Babelsberg Film University 'Konrad Wolf' since 2013.