Hervé Joseph Lebrun

Hervé Joseph Lebrun (France, b. 1963) is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer whose work focuses on queer memory, erotic archives, and political embodiment. While first known for his conceptual photography and literary collaborations, his most significant contribution lies in the field of queer documentary cinema.
He is the director and final editor of Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the '70s (2014), a landmark documentary exploring the golden age of French homo pornographic cinema (1975–1983). Through rare archival footage and interviews with key figures, the film reconstructs a fleeting cinematic moment when 75 homo pornographic films received theatrical releases in France. Mondo Homo premiered at Frameline (San Francisco) and has since been screened worldwide, becoming a key reference for scholars and curators.
Lebrun’s filmmaking practice combines political urgency, historical research, and formal experimentation. His early short films — including Le Lait Nestlé (2002), A Feast of Friends (2003), Kanbrik (2005), and Possession (2007) — engage with queer eroticism, trauma, and surreal allegory. In 2006, he released Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker, Faust Ficker, a short documentary film composed from his photographic collaboration with the German photographer Albrecht Becker, who was imprisoned in Nazi Germany under Paragraph 175.
He also supervised the collective feature films Queer Factory Tales (2004) and Queer Factory Tales 2 (2005), early examples of post-porn political cinema in France, developed within the Queer Factory movement.
In 2008, he co-authored De Pierre et de Seel with Holocaust survivor Pierre Seel — a photographic and testimonial project based on interviews recorded in 2000, and one of the rare projects made in direct collaboration with a French homosexual survivor of Nazi persecution.
From 2010 to 2017, Lebrun served as Executive Director of Chéries-Chéris, the International LGBTQIA+ Film Festival of Paris, where he curated retrospectives on vintage French homo pornographic cinema. He is considered one of the leading experts on this corpus, and has contributed to the restoration, subtitling, and re-circulation of cult films such as Le Beau Mec, Equation to an Unknown, D’hommes à hommes and New York City Inferno.
He also served as historical advisor for Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le cœur, Yann Gonzalez, 2018), a feature inspired by that cinematic era.
In 2023, Lebrun presented two photographic short films — De Pierre et de Seel and Albrecht Becker: I Like This Pain — at the international symposium Queer and Trans Testimonies: From the Holocaust to 2023, held at the University of Cambridge.
In 2024, he directed François About Talks About Le Beau Mec, a 17-minute interview bonus for the Blu-ray release of Le Beau Mec (1979), and completed About François (2025), a documentary portrait of filmmaker and cinematographer François About, now in post-production.
He is also a contributor to the Dictionnaire des films français érotiques et pornographiques en 16 et 35 mm (2011), where he provided comprehensive coverage of all theatrically released French homo pornographic films.
Lebrun’s film work affirms the cultural significance of queer cinema and contributes to its critical integration within broader film history.