Pierre Braunberger

Pierre Braunberger was born in Paris in 1905 into a family of physicians and decided as a child, after seeing Fantômas at the Gaumont, that he would work in cinema instead. He produced Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel between the wars; during the Second World War he could not produce at all, because he was Jewish. Afterwards he became the financier of the French New Wave, backing the early films of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch when nobody else would — the kind of producer whose name is on very few posters and behind a whole generation.