“He told me he longed to make a film from the unseen footage he carefully stores in the basement—his first steps with a camera, his early TV reporting jobs, outtakes, and snatches of his memory,” says Claudine Nougaret, the wife and sound engineer of the celebrated French director and photo-journalist, Raymond Depardon. The short excerpt of Nougaret’s Journal De France sees Depardon capture the calm of a small seaside town in Pas-de-Calais on the English Channel during a journey around the country. The road trip acts as an autobiography of the man and his nation as he shoots cafés, factories, tabacs with his large-format camera. Complementing Depardon’s archive footage of Jean-Luc Godard and Nelson Mandela are clips from his 1981, César Award-winning Reporters, and La Captive du Désert, nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Journal De France screens in selected UK and Ireland cinemas from January 31.