Michel IONASCU is born in 1953 in the suburbs of Paris. In 1969 his father offered him a Super-8 camera to film his return in his country, Romania.
In 1978, he realised several documentaries in South America to describe the social and political reality in Nicaragua (Nicaragua Sandinista, 1981), in Peru (Acomayo : countrymen or terrorists ?, 1983), (Titicaca, 1984), and in Chile (A land for dreaming ?,1985).
After that, Michel Ionascu went through fiction movies which allow him to create a personal style : a thriller (A Strange Day, 1985), an historical fiction (The Witness, 1988) and a portrait of Missak Manouchian, hero of the French Resistance (The Crystal man, 1989) bought by the Vidéothèque de Paris.
In 1990, with the Arscipro film school, he directed a short film (The General) in which he wrote the script and the dialogues from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book. The same year, he is sound engineer on the shooting, in Tunisia, of Pablo Cesar’s second feature film (Equinoccio, the Roses Garden).
In 1995, he is one of the creators of the Railwaymen and Cinema Association called « Those of the Track » which honour president is nobody but Henri Alekan himself. The Association gives every year two prices, the Golden Rails (Short and feature films) at the Cannes Film Festival in the International Critical Week.
Then, he shots two short films : the first one about the experience of the amateur and familial cinema (The unexpected Track, 1996), the other one tells the history of a railwaymen group who love cinema in the Cannes Film Festival (The Search of the Golden Track, 1998). He directed a short film in 35m/m called Extreme Hasard and then The Appoggiatura Manifest in 2005, a thirty five minutes running time fiction film with the Rumanian actress Rona Hartner in the main role. In 2008, he realised a documentary on the railway track built by the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica and a humoristic fiction in Romania called Noroc Express.
Michel Ionascu is also Doctor of Paris Cinema University. His thesis was published in 2001 (Railwaymen and cinema) and in 2010, he wrote a book of thirteen short novels (Secret passages). He is also the author of poetry and wrote numerous papers about cinema and working class. He just finished a new documentary about Missak Manaouchian