Author, singer, filmmaker, and poet, Mathias Malzieu is a multifaceted creator whose fertile imagination permeates literature, music, and film. With his unique voice and dreamlike world, he has become one of the most original and endearing artists on the French cultural scene.
He was born in Montpellier in 1974, grew up in Valence, and then settled in Paris. Passionate about rock music, fantasy films, and surrealist literature, he founded the band Dionysos in 1993, which blends punk energy, absurdist poetry, and unbridled storytelling. With albums like Western sous la neige (2002), Monsters in Love (2005) ou La Mécanique du cœur (2007), Dionysos profoundly marked the French musical landscape. Malzieu was the singer, the author and the conductor, infusing each song with his imagination, both tender and crazy.
Writing as a natural extension of music, and vice versa. Starting in 2007, he embarked on a writing career. His first novel, La Mécanique du cœur, is a runaway success. This gothic tale in the style of Tim Burton, illustrated by Joann Sfar, became a bestseller translated into more than 20 languages. He made an animated film from it in 2014, co-directed with Stéphane Berla, which received a César nomination for best animated film.
Several novels followed, confirming his taste for stories on the border between reality and fantasy: Metamorphosis at the Edge of the Sky (2011), The Smallest Kiss Ever Recorded (2013), Diary of a Vampire in Pajamas (2016), in which he recounts with humor and intensity his battle against a rare disease. This moving autobiographical account was awarded the France Télévisions Essay Prize and adapted into a concert-book by Dionysos.
In 2020, he publish Une sirène à ParisA new fantasy romance that blends love, the sea, and magic. The novel has also been adapted into a film, which he directed, starring Nicolas Duvauchelle and Marilyn Lima. Malzieu confirms his talent as a skilled filmmaker, an heir to Méliès and the great storytellers of cinema. The film captivates with its retro-futuristic atmosphere, its bittersweet humor, and its taste for the wondrous.
Mathias Malzieu is an artist of transversality. Each of his projects is a world unto itself, where texts, music, images, and emotions intersect. He composes albums like one writes novels, directs films like one stages shows. In 2022, he released the album with Dionysos L’Extraordinarium, A selection of his most iconic songs, accompanied by symphonic versions and unreleased duets.
On stage, he becomes a lightning-fast storyteller, a tightrope walker of the imagination. Blending rock and narrative, his concerts are true sensory journeys. Whether he evokes a little boy with a fragile clock, an invisible lover, or a vampire in a bathrobe, Malzieu touches the audience with his sincerity, his gentle madness, and his poetry.
Always seeking new avenues of expression, he continues to alternate between writing, music, film, drawing, and artistic collaborations of all kinds. In 2023, he published Le Guerrier de porcelaine, a moving novel about childhood and war, inspired by his father’s story. He is currently developing a film adaptation.
Mathias Malzieu is a tightrope walker of the imagination, a craftsman of the marvelous. At a time when disciplines are being compartmentalized, he patiently builds a unique body of work, both fragile and exalted, where each book, each song, each image resonates like a mechanical heartbeat — always alive.
