He had also heard of the stories in which French soldiers would leave their trenches at night to meet with their wives in the surrounding German-occupied towns and return to fight the next morning.
In 2001, Carion directed his first feature film: Une hirondelle a fait le printemps (The Girl from Paris), the story, an hommage to his upbringing, tells the meeting of a brooding farmer, Michel Serrault, and a parisian girl seeking the calm of the countryside, played by Mathilde Seigner.
[citation needed] Following this success, Carion started a more ambitious project, Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas).
Screened in Cannes for the film festival in 2005, this historic fiction film depicts the fraternizations of warriors from three different countries on the eve of Christmas during World War I. Carion stated that he'd never heard of the actual Christmas truce incidents while growing up in France, as the French Army and authorities suppressed them, having been viewed as an act of disobedience.
Written using numerous recollections from the northern people, the film depicts the quest of a German dissident, looking for his son.