Jean-François Davy shot his first feature film – The Attack – at the age of 21 which at the time was not so common.
Subsequently, he shot two ambitious but unsuccesful genre movies – Traquenards (with Hans Meyer, seen in Pierrot Le Fou) and Le seuil du vide. As they went unnoticed, Davy – who by then desperately needed a hit – moved on to direct a few bawdy soft porn comedies, featuring unlikely and goofy titles (Mechanical Bananas, Line Up and Lay Down). However his career wouldn’t really take off before meeting Claudine Beccarie, one of the first french porno stars to emerge, way before Brigite Lahaie. Impressed by her persona and her lack of total inhibition, he decided to document her life and her experience as a porn actress, thus inventing the first pornomentary. Against all expectations, Exhibition became a huge success and turned Davy into some kind of erotic film maverick. He shot two sequels to Exhibition, Exhibition II and Exhibition 79. The former is dedicated to the « infamous and scandalous » Sylvia Bourdon while the latter focuses on Claudine Beccarie’s post porn life.
His next movies being unsuccesful, Davy got more and more involved with production and distribution. He started a video company called « Fil à Film » which released high profile and prestigious auteur movies and produced Jean Daniel Pollet’s The Acrobat, Claude Faraldo’s The Honey Flowers and Claude Miller’s The Best Way to Walk
