Mat Ninat

Thirty years on set. From recording studios to red carpets, from editing suites to concert stages — Mat Ninat has built a world where every discipline speaks to the others. Official director and photographer for Canal+, he has moved through three decades of French television — Nulle Part Ailleurs, Le Grand Journal, the César Awards — always with the same eye: precise, instinctive, uncompromising.

Trained as a musician, working as a sound engineer, he knows what music does to an image — and what an image can do to a song. He is the founder of Mat Ninat Studio and Night Angel Records, an independent label based in France, dedicated to analog production and projects that refuse to sound like anything else.

The spark came from his father — rock'n'roll cassettes, Stones, Hendrix, Zeppelin. His mother, Vivienne Chandler, actress and photographer, had worked with Leone, Kubrick, Lucas. He grew up within the Bush family, learned to develop film in the darkroom where Kate Bush album covers were created, practised martial arts with John Bush. Music, photography and cinema were never hobbies — they were life itself.

Photography, music and filmmaking form a single language — his way of freezing time, telling stories and leaving something real behind.