Christian Carion was born into a family of farmers in northern France, where he initially pursued a scientific path after passing his baccalauréat, despite his passion for films dating back to his teenage years.
He joined an engineering school affiliated with the French Ministry of Agriculture, which was his family's wish, but the allure of filmmaking remained strong.
Christian Carion eventually rented a camera and began shooting films, which he described as "uninteresting" at the time, and it was during this period that he met Christophe Rossignon.
The two men decided to collaborate, with Carion as the filmmaker and Rossignon as the producer, and they went on to create a short film, Monsieur le député, in 1999, in which Carion also acted.
In 2001, Carion directed his first feature film, Une hirondelle a fait le printemps, which tells the story of a brooding farmer and a Parisian girl seeking solace in the countryside, and was a huge commercial success, attracting over 2.4 million French moviegoers.
The success of this film allowed Carion to pursue a more ambitious project, Joyeux Noël, which he had been developing since 1993, and which depicts the fraternization of warriors on the eve of Christmas during World War I.
The film premiered at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and was a huge public success, earning numerous César nominations and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Two years later, Carion directed L'affaire Farewell, a spy thriller set in Russia and based on true events, starring Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet.
In 2014, he shot En mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît, a historical drama about the exodus of millions of people in May 1940, when France was under German occupation, and the inhabitants of northern France were fleeing the German troops.
The film was written using numerous recollections from the northern people and depicts the quest of a German dissident searching for his son, with original music composed by Ennio Morricone.
