Biography
Yaël Bitton is an award winning documentary film editor, writer, story consultant, and director with over 25 years of experience, based in Paris.
She has won the SIMA Editing Award for Radio Silence (2020), Best Editing at the Israel Documentary Forum for Advocate (2019), and the Adobe Dok Fest Editing Award for KIX (2024). She is a member of the Oscars Academy documentary branch, and was invited by the NCE to give a masterclass at IDFA 2023.
For a long time now, she has been collaborating with documentary filmmakers around the world, working on films that have been recognised at major festivals including Cannes, Sundance, Venice, and IDFA… More recently, she has edited and written (among others) with director Petra Costa, whose latest film Apocalypse in the Tropics opened at Venice film festival (2024) ; with Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivisan on Nocturnes (2024), which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft; with Balint Revesz and David Mikulan on KIX (2024) which won best film at Camden film festival 2024, and garnered the FIPRESCI Award at GoEast 2024, the Camera Justitia award and the Aljazeera Impact award at Movies that matter 2024; with Rahul Jain, whose latest film Invisible Demons (2021) premiered at the Cannes film Festival that year and whose first film Machines (2015) won numerous prizes worldwide ; with Felipe Monroy on three films, including the powerful Hijos del Viento (2021); with Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche on Advocate (20219) which won, among many awards, the Emmy award for Best documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen awards for best documentary feature; and with Juliana Fanjul on there two feature films Radio Silence (2019) and Muchachas (2014).
Her most recent projects as an editor include Ceux qui veillent by Karima Saïdi (2024), La muraille by Callisto Mc Nulty (2024), and The World is Not (A) Mine by Natalia Korniaz (2024) , soon to be premiering at international festivals.
In addition to her editing work, Yaël is a sought-after mentor, consultant, and educator, working with programs such as Rough Cut Service, Docs Nomads, Zelig Documentary film school, DOK Incubator, Visions du Réel, and Ex Oriente. She has been teaching editing at HEAD/Cinéma du Réel in Geneva since 2008. During the Spring semester of 2024, she was invited as a fellow teacher at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York.
Yaël directed two feature documentary films, Not for Sale (2002) and The Rabbi’s 12 children (2007).
These days she is working on short formats pocket films, under the title “Zeitlos”- beyond of time, timeless- stemming from her praxis as film editor. The pocket films are designed to be projected on various surfaces and screens in installation spaces. They deal with the nature and perception and cognition, attention and memory, time and erasure, narrativity and representation, language and silence. In a world involving relentless exposure to a barrage of manipulated images and edited content that hijack our attention, circumscribe our thoughts and emotions and redefine our cognition, can we reclaim an ontological language beyond the literal expression of our human stories? What kinds of images are necessary to develop and display in a world saturated with visuality and visibility?