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Before coming to films, French filmmaker Louis Daquin studied law and then worked as an advertiser and a journalist. In 1932, he began assisting such directors as Duvivier and Gance, but is best remembered for his daring debut film Nous les Gosses/Portrait of Innocence which was made when the Nazis occupied France and the film managed to escape the sharp eyes of the enemy censors. He was an outspoken filmmaker who often used his films to call for social reform or criticized conditions of the working class. This made him so unpopular in France that he was subtly blackballed in the late '50s and so made films in West Germany, Austria and Rumania. Another of Daquin's prestigious films is Le Poit du Jour (1948), a criticism of the conditions miners are subjected to. Much later in his career, he became director of studies at IDHEC. In 1960, he published the book Le Cinema-Notre Metier.