Claude Lazar was born in 1947 in Alexandria (Egypt), to French parents when his father was working for the Shell Oil Company. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Ecole des métiers d’art. During the May ‘68 rebellion, he joined a radical film collective close to the Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1974, he joined the Jeune Peinture and became its secretary general from 1975 until 1977. He was very close friend of Ezzedine Kalak, the PLO representative in France whose assassination in 1978 was so traumatic that he withdrew from dedicating energy to the causes that impassioned him (the struggle of the Palestinian people foremost).