• Abdellatif Kechiche
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• Academy Awards
• Adieu Philippine
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• Alain Corneau
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• Alamo Bay
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• Alexandra Stewart
• Alexandre Astruc
• Andrzej Wajda
• André Bazin
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• Anton Chekhov
• Armand Gatti
• Auteur theory
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• 
  

• 
  California
  California (pronounced ⁱ/kælɨˈfɔrnjə/) is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third most extensive (after Alaska and Texas). It is home to the nation's second- and sixth-largest census statistical areas (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and San Francisco Bay Area), and eight of the nation's fifty most populated cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland). The capital city is Sacramento.
  California's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west, to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east – from the Redwood–Douglas-fir forests of the northwest, to the Mojave Desert areas in the southeast. The center of the state is dominated by Central Valley, a major agricultural area. California contains both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley), and has the third-longest coastline of all states (after Alaska and Florida). Earthquakes are a common occurrence due to the state's location along the Pacific Ring of Fire: about 37,000 are recorded annually.
  
  wn.com/California
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  Cannes Film Festival
  The Cannes International Film Festival (French: Le Festival International du Film de Cannes or just Festival de Cannes), is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is the world's most prestigious and publicized film festival. The invitation-only festival is held annually (usually in May) at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
  The 2012 Cannes Film Festival took place from May 16 to May 27, 2012. The President of the Jury was the Italian film director Nanni Moretti.
  The Cannes Film Festival has its origins in the late 1930s when Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, on the proposal of Philippe Erlanger and with the support of the British and Americans,^{[clarification needed]} set up an international cinematographic festival. In 1947, the festival was held as the "Festival du film de Cannes", where films from sixteen countries were presented. Moreover, the principle of equality was introduced, so that the jury was to be made up only of one representative per country. Also, this year the festival was held at the made-for-the-occasion Palais des Festivals, although the roof was unfinished and blew off during a storm. The festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 on account of budgetary problems. In 1951, owing to better relations between France and Italy, the Cannes Festival was moved to Spring, while the Mostra remained in Autumn.
  
  wn.com/Cannes_Film_Festival
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  France
  France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).
  Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
  
  wn.com/France
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  Thumeries
  Coordinates: 50°28′47″N 3°03′20″E / 50.4797°N 3.0556°E / 50.4797; 3.0556
  Thumeries is a commune in the Nord department in northern France.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Thumeries
• 
  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
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  Vichy
  Coordinates: 46°07′40″N 3°25′36″E / 46.1278°N 3.4267°E / 46.1278; 3.4267
  Vichy (French pronunciation: [viʃi]; Occitan: Vichèi) is a commune in the department of Allier in Auvergne in central France. It belongs to the historic province of Bourbonnais.
  It is known as a spa and resort town and was the de facto capital of Vichy France during the World War II Nazi German occupation from 1940 to 1944.
  The town's inhabitants are called Vichyssois. Up until the 18th century they were more properly known as les Vichois which stems from the Occitan name of the town, Vichèi. The writer Valery Larbaud uses the term Vicaldiens after the Ancient Roman name for the community^{[citation needed]}.
  With 80,194 inhabitants, Vichy's urban area is the second largest in the Auvergne region behind Clermont-Ferrand.
  The city enjoys a continental climate climate that incorporates some characteristics of a mountainous climate because of the nearby Massif Central and Alps.Heavy snows in the Massif Central often make roads impassable, but Vichy is low enough at about 800 feet (240 metres) above sea level that the climate is more continental. Rainfall is moderate around Vichy, averaging about 30 inches (75 centimeters) annually.
  
  wn.com/Vichy

• Abdellatif Kechiche
  Abdellatif Kechiche (Arabic: عبد اللطيف كشيش‎, born December 7, 1960 in Tunis, Tunisia) is an actor, movie director and screenwriter. He made his directorial debut in 2000 with La Faute à Voltaire (Blame it on Voltaire), aka Poetical Refugee, which he also wrote. He also directed L'Esquive, which won a César Award for Best Film and Best Director. He has presented recently his last film La Graine et le Mulet on 64th Mostra del Cinema at Venezia for which he was awarded the Special Jury Prize, the FIPRESCI Prize, such as later the Louis Delluc Prize and others César Awards for Best Film and Best Director.
  As an actor, his introduction to most English-speaking audiences was starring as Ashade the taxi driver in the 2005 psychological thriller "Sorry, Haters", an "official selection" in both the Toronto and American Film Institute's film festivals.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Abdellatif_Kechiche
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  Agnès Varda
  Agnès Varda (born 30 May 1928) is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style.
  The career of Agnès Varda is an important and often overlooked voice in the modern French cinema. Her career pre-dates the start of the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) , andLa Pointe Courte contains many elements specific to that movement that make it famous.
  Varda was born Arlette Varda in Brussels, Belgium, the daughter of Christiane (née Pasquet) and Eugene Jean Varda, an engineer. Her mother was French and her father's family were Greek refugees from Asia Minor.
  
  wn.com/Agnès_Varda
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  Akira Kurosawa
  Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明, Kurosawa Akira^?, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, producer, and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.
  Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director in 1943, during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. Judo Saga). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films.
  Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo in August 1950, and which also starred Mifune, became, on September 10, 1951, the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was subsequently released in Europe and North America. The commercial and critical success of this film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa directed approximately a film a year, including a number of highly regarded films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). After the mid-1960s, he became much less prolific, but his later work—including his final two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards, including the Palme d'Or for Kagemusha, though more often abroad than in Japan.
  
  wn.com/Akira_Kurosawa
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  Alain Cavalier
  Alain Cavalier (born September 14, 1931) is a French film director. He was born in Vendôme, Loir-et-Cher and studied film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. He won several awards, including the César Award for Best Film and César Award for Best Director for his film Thérèse in 1987. His latest film Pater premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
  He was married to the French film actress and former Miss France winner Irène Tunc.
  
  wn.com/Alain_Cavalier
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  Alain Corneau
  Alain Corneau (7 August 1943 – 30 August 2010) was a French film director and writer.
  Corneau was born in Meung-sur-Loire, Loiret. Originally a musician, he worked with Costa-Gavras as an assistant, which was also his first opportunity to work with the actor Yves Montand, with whom he would collaborate three times later in his career, including Police Python 357 (1976) and La Menace (1977). He directed Gérard Depardieu in the screen adaptation of Tous les matins du monde in 1991.
  Corneau died in Paris on 30 August 2010 from cancer, aged 67 and was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
  
  wn.com/Alain_Corneau
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  Alain Resnais
  Alain Resnais (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; born 3 June 1922) is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.
  He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave or nouvelle vague, though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the 'Left Bank group' of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.
  
  wn.com/Alain_Resnais
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  Alan Parker
  Sir Alan William Parker, CBE (born 14 February 1944) is an English film director, producer, writer and actor. He has been active in both the British cinema and American cinema and was a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain.
  Parker was born into a working class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He attended Dame Alice Owen's School. Parker started out as a copywriter for advertising agencies in the 1960s and 1970s and later began to write his own television commercial scripts. His most celebrated and enduring advertising work was when he worked for famed London agency Collett Dickenson Pearce where he directed many award winning commercials, including the famous Cinzano vermouth advertisement, starring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, shown in the UK.
  His film career began through his association with producer David Puttnam, now Lord Puttnam, when he wrote the screenplay for the feature Melody (1971). Puttnam would later produce a number of Parker's films including Midnight Express (1978). This was a highly controversial film set in a Turkish prison that was lauded by critics and ended up earning a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Parker. He was later nominated for Best Director with Mississippi Burning (1988).
  
  wn.com/Alan_Parker
• Alexandra Stewart
  Alexandra Stewart (born June 10, 1939) is a Canadian actress.
  Born in Montreal, Quebec, Alexandra Stewart left for Paris, France, in 1958, to study art. Within a year, she made her film debut in Les Motards, and has since then enjoyed a steady career in both French and English-speaking films.
  Besides her cinema career, she regularly appeared on television in shows such as Les Jeux de 20 heures and L'Académie des neuf. She has also appeared in the 1981 cartoon Space Stars and had cameos in Highlander: The Series, The Saint and the pilot episode of The X-Files.
  She was part of the jury of the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival.
  She has a daughter, Justine, with the French director Louis Malle.
  
  wn.com/Alexandra_Stewart
• Alexandre Astruc
  Alexandre Astruc is a French film critic and film director born 13 July 1923, in Paris (France).
  Before becoming a film director he was a journalist, novelist and film critic. His role in the auteur theory is his notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that a director should wield his camera like a writer uses his pen and that he need not be hindered by traditional storytelling.
  In 1994 he was awarded the René Clair Award for his whole body of film work.
  (s) indicates films also co-scripted by Astruc
  
  
  
  wn.com/Alexandre_Astruc
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  Andrzej Wajda
  Andrzej Wajda (Polish pronunciation: [ˈandʐɛj ˈvajda]; born 6 March 1926) is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film School" (active c. 1955 to 1963). He is known especially for a trilogy of war films: A Generation (1954), Kanał (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).
  Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land (1975),The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyń (2007).
  Wajda was born in Suwałki, Poland, the son of Aniela (née Biaxowas), a school teacher, and Jakub Wajda, an army officer. Wajda' father was murdered by the Soviets in 1940 in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre. In 1942 he joined the Polish resistance and served in the Armia Krajowa. After the war, he studied to be a painter at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts before entering the Łódź Film School.
  After Wajda's apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film. With A Generation (1955), the first-time director poured out his disillusionment over jingoism, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski, 22-year-old Roman Polanski also featured. At the same time Andrzej Wajda began his work as a director in theatre, including such as Michael V. Gazzo's Hatful of Rain (1959), Hamlet (1960), and Two for the Seesaw (1963) by William Gibson. Wajda made two more increasingly accomplished films, which developed further the anti-war theme of A Generation: Kanał (1956) [Silver Palm at Cannes Festival in 1957, ex equo with Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), again with Cybulski.
  
  wn.com/Andrzej_Wajda
• André Bazin
  André Bazin (18 April 1918 – 11 November 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.
  Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918. He died in 1958, age 40, due to leukemia.
  Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca. Bazin was a major force in post-World War II film studies and criticism. In addition to editing Cahiers until his death, a four-volume collection of his writings was published posthumously from 1958 to 1962 and titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?). A selection from this collection was translated into English and published in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became mainstays of film courses in the English-speaking world, but were never updated or revised. In 2009, the Canadian publisher caboose, taking advantage of more favourable Canadian copyright laws, compiled fresh translations of some of the key essays from the collection in a single-volume edition. With annotations by translator Timothy Barnard, this became the only corrected and annotated edition of these writings in any language.
  
  wn.com/André_Bazin
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  André Téchiné
  André Téchiné (born 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen (Tarn-et-Garonne) in France), is a French screenwriter and film director. He has had a long and distinguished career that places him among the best post-New Wave French film directors.
  He belongs to a second generation of French film critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma who followed François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and others from criticism into film-making. Téchiné is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of human condition and emotions.
  One of the trademarks of his filmography is the lyrical examination of human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way, as can be seen in his most acclaimed films: My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds (1994).
  André Téchiné was born on 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen, a small town in the Midi-Pyrénées region, department of Tarn-et-Garonne, France. His family, of Spanish ancestry, owned a small business making agricultural equipment. He grew up in the south west French country side and in his adolescence acquired a passion for films. From 1952 to 1959 he went to a Catholic boarding school in Montauban. He was allowed to leave the school only on Sunday afternoons when he would go to the cinema, although he often had to return before the screening ended. From 1959 he attended a secular state school, which exposed him to a different culture, with Marxist teachers, a cine club and a film magazine, La Plume et l'écran, to which he contributed. "Films were my only opening to the world," Téchiné explained in an interview. "They were my only possibility of escaping my family environment and my boarding school. It was probably dangerous because, through movies, I learned how the world works and how human relations work. But it was magical, and I was determined to follow the thread of that magic."
  
  wn.com/André_Téchiné
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  Ang Lee
  Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; Pinyin: Lǐ Ān; born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese-American film director. Lee has directed a diverse set of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), Hulk (2003), and Brokeback Mountain (2005), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director. He is the first person of Asian descent to win the Best Director Oscar.
  Ang Lee was born in the town of Chaochou in Pingtung, a southern agricultural county in Taiwan. He grew up in a household that put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics. Both of Lee's parents moved to Taiwan from China following the Chinese Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Lee's father, a native of Jiangxi Province in southern China, imbued his children with studying Chinese culture and art, especially calligraphy.
  Lee studied in the National Tainan First Senior High School where his father was the principal. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College/University Entrance Examination, the only route to a university education in Taiwan. But after failing the Exam twice, to the disappointment of his father, he entered a three-year college, National Arts School (now reorganized and expanded as National Taiwan University of Arts) and graduated in 1975. His father had wanted him to become a professor, but he had become interested in drama and the arts at college. This early frustration set his career on the path of performance art. Seeing Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring (1960) was a formative experience for him.
  
  wn.com/Ang_Lee
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  Anton Chekhov
  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
  Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."
  
  wn.com/Anton_Chekhov
• Armand Gatti
  Armand Gatti (born on January 26, 1924 - ) is a French playwright, poet, journalist, screenwriter, film-maker and former WW II resistance fighter. His 1963 film, El Otro Cristóbal was entered into the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.
  One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Jean Cayrol, but because none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles. He appears in Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and in Marker’s Immemory CD-Rom; he wrote China (1956) for Marker’s Petite Planète collection and traveled with Marker in the making of Letter from Siberia (1957), which inspired his book Siberia — Zero + Infinity the following year.
  According to his 1989 biographer, Dorothy Knowles, Gatti was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco (his Italian anarchist father, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities, fled Benito Mussolini’s regime); during World War II, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Gatti eventually escaped and joined a British Special Air Service special forces team. After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, The Enclosure (L’Enclos, 1961).
  
  wn.com/Armand_Gatti
• Baz Luhrmann
  Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann (/ˈbæz ˈlʊərmən/; born 17 September 1962) is an Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, which includes his films Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!. In 2008, he released his film Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.
  Luhrmann was born in Sydney, Australia to a mother who was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner, and Leonard Luhrmann, a farmer. He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in northern New South Wales, where his father ran a petrol station and a movie theatre, both of which would influence his son's film-making career. He attended St. Joseph's Hasting Regional School, Port Macquarie 1975-1978 and Balgowlah Boys Campus. He attended Year 11 at Narrabeen Sports High School in Sydney, performing in the school's version of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. His nickname was given to him because of a perceived resemblance to the character Basil Brush.^{[citation needed]} Luhrmann first auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1980 but didn't get into the prestigious drama school. He successfully auditioned again two years later, starting the three-year acting course in 1983. He graduated from NIDA in 1985, alongside Sonia Todd, Catherine McClements and Justin Monjo.
  
  wn.com/Baz_Luhrmann
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  Bertrand Blier
  Bertrand Blier (born 14 March 1939) is a French screenwriter and film director.
  Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. He is the son of Bernard Blier. His 1996 film Mon Homme was entered into the 46th Berlin International Film Festival.
  A defence of Blier's work up until 2000 was written by Sue Harris, Queen Mary College, London and published in 2001 By Manchester University Press.
  As director (unless otherwise specified):
  <Bertrand Blier by Sue Harris, Manchester University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7190-5297-1/></>
  
  wn.com/Bertrand_Blier
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  Bertrand Tavernier
  Bertrand Tavernier (born 25 April 1941) is a French director, screenwriter, actor, and producer.
  Tavernier was born in Lyon, the son of Geneviève (née Dumond) and René Tavernier, a publicist and writer, several years president of the French PEN club. Tavernier wanted to become a filmmaker since the age of thirteen or fourteen years old. He claims that his cinematic influences include filmmakers John Ford, William Wellman, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and Jacques Becker. The first film director with whom he worked was Jean-Pierre Melville. Later, his first film (The Clockmaker, 1974) won the Prix Louis Delluc and the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize award at the 24th Berlin International Film Festival.
  His early work was dominated by mysteries, but his later work is characterized by a more overt social commentary, highlighting his pacifism (Life and Nothing But, Capitaine Conan) and presenting a critical picture of contemporary French society (Ça commence aujourd'hui, Histoires de vies brisées : les double-peine de Lyon).
  
  wn.com/Bertrand_Tavernier
• Bill Forsyth
  Bill Forsyth (born 29 July 1946) is a Scottish film director and writer best known for his films Gregory's Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983), and Comfort and Joy (1984), as well as his commitment to national film-making.
  William David Forsyth was born 29 July 1946 in Glasgow, Scotland. After graduating Knightswood School at the age of 17, he spent eight years making short documentary films.
  Forsyth first came to attention with a low-budget film, That Sinking Feeling, made with youth theatre actors and featuring a cameo appearance by the Edinburgh gallery owner Richard Demarco. The relative success of the film was carried to a far higher level by his next film Gregory's Girl in 1981. This featured some of the same young actors, in particular John Gordon Sinclair, as well as the acting debut of Clare Grogan. The film was a major hit and won 'Best Screenplay' in that year's BAFTA Awards. In 1983 he wrote and directed the successful Local Hero, produced by David Puttnam, and featuring Burt Lancaster. It was rated in the top 100 films of the 1980s in a Premiere magazine recap of the decade. Forsyth's next film was the 1984 Comfort and Joy, about a Glasgow radio DJ caught in a rivalry between ice cream companies, which again featured Clare Grogan.
  
  wn.com/Bill_Forsyth
• Bob Fosse
  Robert Louis “Bob” Fosse (June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987) was an American actor, dancer, musical theater choreographer, director, screenwriter, film editor and film director. He won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for his direction of Cabaret (beating Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather). He was closely identified with his third wife, Broadway dancing star Gwen Verdon. She was the dancer/collaborator/muse upon whom he choreographed much of his work and, together with dancer/choreographer Ann Reinking, a significant guardian of the Fosse legacy after his death.
  Fosse was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Norwegian American father, Cyril K. Fosse, and Irish-born mother, Sara Alice (Stanton), the second youngest of six children. He teamed up with Charles Grass, another young dancer, and began a collaboration under the name The Riff Brothers. They toured theatres throughout the Chicago area. Eventually Fosse was hired for Tough Situation, which toured military and naval bases in the Pacific.
  
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  Candice Bergen
  Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model.
  She is known for starring in two TV series, as the title character on the situation comedy Murphy Brown (1988–1998), for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards; and as Shirley Schmidt on the comedy-drama Boston Legal (2004–2008), for which she was nominated for two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Her first film was The Group (1965), which was based on Mary McCarthy's novel of the same name. She starred in several major films throughout the mid 1960s to early 1980s such as The Sand Pebbles, Carnal Knowledge, The Wind and the Lion, and Gandhi and received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Starting Over. Her later career includes character roles in Miss Congeniality and Sweet Home Alabama.
  Bergen was born in Beverly Hills, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model who was known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Her paternal grandparents were Swedish-born immigrants who anglicized their surname, which was originally Berggren. As a child, Candice was irritated at being referred to as Charlie McCarthy's little sister, Charlie McCarthy being her father's star dummy.
  
  wn.com/Candice_Bergen
• Chris Marker
  Chris Marker (born 29 July 1921) is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti.
  His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais has called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."
  Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921. Always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him, his place of birth is highly disputed. Some sources and Marker himself claim that he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Other sources say he was born in Belleville, Paris, and others, in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The 1949 edition of Le Cœur Net specifies his birthday as July 22. Film critic David Thomson has stated: "Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct- but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator." When asked about his secretive nature, Marker has said "My films are enough for them (the audience)."
  
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  Claude Chabrol
  Claude Chabrol (French: [klod ʃaˈbʁɔl]; 1930–2010) was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague) group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues and contemporaries Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma before beginning his career as a film maker.
  Chabrol's career began with Le Beau Serge (1958), inspired by Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Thrillers became something of a trademark for Chabrol, with an approach characterized by a distanced objectivity. This is especially apparent in Les Biches (1968), La Femme Infidèle (1969) and Le Boucher (1970) — all featuring his then-wife, Stéphane Audran.
  Sometimes characterized as a "mainstream" New Wave director, Chabrol remained prolific and popular throughout his half-century career. In 1978, he cast Isabelle Huppert as the lead in Violette Nozière. On the strength of that effort, the pair went on to others including the successful Madame Bovary (1991) and La Ceremonie (1996).
  
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• Claude Sautet
  Claude Sautet (23 February 1924 – 22 July 2000) was a French author and film director.
  Born in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Sautet first studied painting and sculpture before attending a film university in Paris where he began his career and later became a television producer. He filmed his first movie, Bonjour Sourire, in 1955.
  He earned international attention with Les Choses de la Vie (1969), which he wrote and directed, like the rest of his later films. It was shown in competition at the 1970 Cannes Festival, where it was well received. The film also revived the career of Romy Schneider; she acted in several of Sautet's later films. In Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971) she played a prostitute, while in César et Rosalie (1972) she portrayed a married woman who copes with the reappearance of an old flame.
  Vincent, Paul, François, et les Autres (1974) is one of Sautet's most acclaimed films. Four middle-class men meet in the country every weekend mainly to discuss their lives. The film featured a cast of major stars of French cinema: Michel Piccoli, Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu, and Stéphane Audran. He achieved even further critical success with Mado (1976).
  
  wn.com/Claude_Sautet
• Claude Zidi
  Claude Zidi (born July 25, 1934) is a French film director and screenwriter who is noted for his mainstream burlesque comedies. Born in Paris, he started as a cameraman and then cinematographer, and made his directorial and screenwriting debut in 1971. He won the César Award for Best Director for My New Partner, for which he was also nominated for Best Writing.
  
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• 
  Coen brothers
  Joel David Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers. Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit.
  The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.
  Joel and Ethan Coen, of Jewish heritage, grew up in a Jewish community in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their father, Edward, was an economist at the University of Minnesota, and their mother, Rena, an art historian at St. Cloud State University.
  When they were children, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering ("Zeimers"),^{[citation needed]} as the star. Their first attempt was a romp titled, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia, which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.
  
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  Danny Boyle
  Daniel "Danny" Boyle (born 20 October 1956) is an English filmmaker and producer. He is best known for his work on films such as Slumdog Millionaire, Shallow Grave, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Trainspotting. For Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle won numerous awards in 2008, including the Academy Award for Best Director. Boyle was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2008 Austin Film Festival, where he also introduced that year's AFF Audience Award Winner Slumdog Millionaire. On 17 June 2010, it was announced that he will be the Artistic Director for the 2012 Olympic games opening ceremony.
  Boyle was born on 20 October 1956 in Radcliffe, Lancashire, (now in the modern day metropolitan borough of Bury, Greater Manchester) into a working-class Irish Catholic family. His mother was from Ballinasloe in County Galway, and his father was born in England to an Irish family.
  It was a very strict, Catholic family. I was an altar boy for eight years, I was supposed to be a priest and really, it was my mother's fondest wish that I would become one.
  
  wn.com/Danny_Boyle
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  David Fincher
  David Andrew Leo Fincher (born August 28, 1962) is an American film and music video director who is known for his dark and stylish thrillers, such as Seven (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), and Zodiac (2007). Fincher received Academy Award nominations for Best Director for his 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and his 2010 film The Social Network, which also won him the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for Best Director. His most recent film is 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, an English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel of the same name.
  Fincher was born on August 28, 1962 in Denver, Colorado, the son of Claire Mae (née Boettcher), a mental health nurse who worked in drug addiction programs, and Howard Kelly Fincher, who worked as a bureau chief for Life under the name Jack Fincher. When Fincher was two years old, the family moved to San Anselmo in Marin County, California. Fincher moved to Ashland, Oregon in his teens, where he graduated from Ashland High School. Inspired by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Fincher began making movies at age eight with an 8 mm camera. Fincher eschewed the film school route, getting a job loading cameras and doing other hands-on work for John Korty’s Korty Films. He was later hired by Industrial Light & Magic in 1983, where he worked on productions for Twice Upon a Time, Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In 1984, he left ILM to direct a commercial for the American Cancer Society, that would show a fetus smoking a cigarette. This quickly brought Fincher to the attention of producers in Los Angeles and he was given the chance to direct the documentary The Beat of the Live Drum featuring Rick Springfield in 1985. Though he would continue to direct spots for companies like Revlon, Converse, Nike, Pepsi, Sony, and Levi's, Fincher soon discovered music videos and went on to direct many promos.
  
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  Denys Arcand
  Georges-Henri Denys Arcand, CC CQ (French pronunciation: [dəni aʁkɑ̃]; born June 25, 1941) is a Canadian film director, screenwriter and producer. He has won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2004 for The Barbarian Invasions. He has also been nominated three further times, including two in the Best Foreign Film category for The Decline of the American Empire in 1987 and Jesus of Montreal in 1990, becoming the only French-Canadian director in history to receive this amount of nominations and, subsequently, winning the award. Also for The Barbarian Invasions, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, losing to Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation. Denys Arcand has directed three of the five Canadian movies to ever receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. During his three decades career, he became the most renowned and accomplished Quebec's director, winning many awards from the Cannes Film Festival and many other prestigious awards. He won three César Awards in 2004 for The Barbarian Invasions, including Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film.
  
  wn.com/Denys_Arcand
• Dominik Moll
  Dominik Moll (born 7 May 1962) is a German born French film director and screenwriter. He wrote and directed Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien and Lemming. He was born in Bühl, West Germany.
  For his achievements on the film Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien, he won the 2001 César Award for Best Director. Both Lemming and Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien were nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
  
  
  
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  Ettore Scola
  Ettore Scola (born 10 May 1931) is an Italian screenwriter and film director. He was born in Trevico, province of Avellino (Campania).
  He entered the film industry as a screenwriter in 1953, and directed his first film, Let's Talk About Women, in 1964. In 1974 Scola enjoyed international success with We All Loved Each Other So Much (C'eravamo tanto amati), a wide fresco of post-World War II Italy life and politics, dedicated to fellow director Vittorio De Sica. In 1976 he won the Prix de la mise en scène at Cannes Film Festival for Brutti, sporchi e cattivi.
  Since then Ettore Scola has made several successful films, including A Special Day (1977), That Night In Varennes (1982), What Time Is It? (1989) and Captain Fracassa's Journey (1990). Ettore Scola has directed close to 40 films in some 40 years, and he is still active.
  His film Passione d'amore, adapted from a nineteenth-century novel, was adapted by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine into the award-winning musical Passion.
  In 1988 he was a member of the jury at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.
  
  wn.com/Ettore_Scola
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  Francis Ford Coppola
  Francis Ford Coppola ( /ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Philip Kaufman, and George Lucas who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making.
  He co-wrote the script for Patton (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather (1972), a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director.
  Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was highly praised and won him three Academy Awards—for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed Apocalypse Now (1979); notorious for its overlong and strenuous production, but critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. To this day, Coppola is one of only seven filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards, and is the only filmmaker to win both in the same decade.
  
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  François Truffaut
  François Roland Truffaut (6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was an influential film critic and filmmaker, one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five films.
  Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932. His mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and his grandmother for a number of years. It was his grandmother who instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his grandmother until her death when Truffaut was ten years old. It was only after his grandmother's death that he lived with his parents for the first time. The identity of Truffaut's biological father was unknown, though a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that their enquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the findings but Truffaut himself believed and embraced them.
  
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  French people
  The French (French: Français) are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups. Within France, the French are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence.
  However, the word can also refer to people of French descent who are found in other countries, with significant French-speaking population groups or not, such as Argentina (French Argentines), Brazil (French Brazilians), French West Indies (the French Caribbean people), Canada (French Canadians) and the United States (French Americans), and some of them have a French cultural identity. The United Kingdom also has a large French population, mainly in England, and due to historic relations and immigration.
  To be French, according to the first article of the Constitution, is to be a citizen of France, regardless of one's origin, race, or religion (sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion). According to its principles, France has devoted herself to the destiny of a proposition nation, a generic territory where people are bounded only by the French language and the assumed willingness to live together, as defined by Ernest Renan's "plébiscite de tous les jours" ("daily referendum" on the willingness to live together, in Renan's 1882 essay "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?").
  
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• George Roy Hill
  George Roy Hill (December 20, 1921 – December 27, 2002) was an American film director. He is most noted for directing such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, which both starred the acting duo Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Other notable films are Slaughterhouse-Five, The World According to Garp, The World of Henry Orient, Hawaii, Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Funny Farm, A Little Romance with Laurence Olivier, and The Little Drummer Girl.
  He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to George Roy and Helen Frances Owens Hill, part of a well-to-do Roman Catholic family with interests in the newspaper business; the family owned the Minneapolis Tribune. Hill was no relation to George W. Hill, director and cinematographer of numerous silent movies and early sound films in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was educated at The Blake School, one of Minnesota's most prestigious private schools. He had a love of flying. After school, he liked to visit the airport and his hobby was to memorize the records of World War I flying aces. He idolized U.S. pilot Speed Holman who, Hill once explained, "used to make his approach to the spectators at state fairs flying past the grandstand upside down." Hill obtained his pilot’s licence at the age of 16. Airplanes featured prominently in his later films and are frequently crashed as well — in Slaughterhouse-Five, The World According to Garp and especially The Great Waldo Pepper which showed the influence on Hill of pilots like Speed Holman.
  
  wn.com/George_Roy_Hill
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  Guillaume Canet
  Guillaume Canet (born 10 April 1973) is a French actor and film director.
  Canet began his career in theatre and television before moving to film. He starred in several films like Joyeux Noël, Love Me If You Dare and The Beach. In 2006, he turned to writing and directing with Tell No One and won a César Award for Best Director.
  Canet has also received attention because of his personal life. He was formerly married to actress Diane Kruger. After they divorced he began a relationship with Marion Cotillard that was closely followed by the media.
  Canet was born in Boulogne-Billancourt on 10 April 1973 to a family of horse breeders. Canet intended to become a show jumper and performed with the junior French National Equestrian Team. However, after a fall from his horse at age 18 he turned to acting and enrolled in the Cours Florent drama school. In 1994 he appeared in the Théâtre Hébertot production of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant with Christophe Malavoy. After working in various television shows and commercials, Canet made his film debut in the short film "Fils unique".
  
  wn.com/Guillaume_Canet
• Henri Colpi
  Henri Colpi (15 July 1921, Brigue, Switzerland – 14 January 2006, Menton, France) was a French film editor and film director.
  Colpi directed the 1961 film Une aussi longue absence, which is well-known for sharing the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival with Viridiana, which was directed by Luis Buñuel.Une aussi longue absence was written by Marguerite Duras, featured Alida Valli in a major role, and included music by Georges Delerue. It also won the Louis Delluc Prize in 1960. His second feature Codine was also screening in competition at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, where Colpi won the prize for Best Screenplay.
  Colpi is also noted as a film editor with about 20 credits, including Alain Resnais' films Hiroshima mon amour (1961) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1963).
  In addition to directing, editing, acting, sound recording, and a variety of functions in the post-War years, he was featured in a French television series, Histoire du cinéma français par ceux qui l'ont fait (The History of French Cinema By Those Who Made It) in 1974, and he continued to work into the 1990s.
  
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  Henri Langlois
  Henri Langlois (13 November 1914, İzmir, Ottoman Empire – 13 January 1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema. His film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideas that led to the development of the auteur theory.
  Langlois was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry and also co-founder of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 1938. Through close collaboration with the Cinémathèque's longtime Chief Archivist, Lotte Eisner, he worked to preserve films and film history in the post-war era. An eccentric who was often at the center of controversy for his methods, he also served as a key influence on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would become the French New Wave.
  In 1974, Langlois received an honorary Academy Award for "his devotion to the art of film, his massive contributions in preserving its past and his unswerving faith in its future."
  
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  Jacques Audiard
  Jacques Audiard (French pronunciation: [ʒak odjaʁ]; born 30 April 1952) is a French film director, the son of Michel Audiard, also a notable screenwriter and film director.
  He won twice both the César Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language, in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and in 2010 for A Prophet. He also won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. His film Rust and Bone competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
  Audiard was born in Paris. At the beginning of the 1980s he successfully began screenwriting, including Réveillon chez Bob! and Mortelle randonnée, Baxter, Fréquence Meurtre and Saxo.
  In 1994, he directed the film Regarde les hommes tomber, a road movie with Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The film won the César Award for the best first film and the prix Georges-Sadoul. Two years later he reunited with Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant on his second movie Un héros très discret adapted from the eponymous novel by Jean-François Deniau.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_Audiard
• Jacques Demy
  Jacques Demy (5 June 1931 – 27 October 1990) was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François Truffaut, drawing on musicals, fairytales and the golden age of Hollywood.
  After working with the animator Paul Grimault and the filmmaker Georges Rouquier, Demy directed his first feature film, Lola, in 1961, with Anouk Aimée playing the eponymous cabaret singer. The Demy universe here emerges full-fledged. Characters burst into song (courtesy of composer and lifelong Demy-collaborator Michel Legrand); iconic Hollywood imagery is lovingly appropriated as in the opening scene with the man in a white Stetson in the Cadillac, daringly set to Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony"); plot is dictated by the director's fascination with fate, and stock themes of chance encounters and long-lost love; and the setting, as with so many of Demy's films, is the French Atlantic coast of his childhood, specifically the seaport town of Nantes.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_Demy
• Jacques Rivette
  Jacques Rivette (French pronunciation: [ʒak ʁivɛt]; born 1 March 1928) is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. His best-known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1.
  He was a member of the French New Wave, a group that included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the 1960s (though Rivette perhaps had greater success and recognition as a filmmaker in the 1970s). As a film critic, he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Tashlin. As a film director, he is known for using extending running times and loose narratives to explore the symbiosis and clash between one's reality and one's imagination (a space that frequently occurs when characters voluntarily extend the logic/rules of game boards or theatrical stages into their everyday existence). His films often combine the paranoid and conspiratorial crime stories from films by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang with the more carefree characters from the films of Jean Renoir and Howard Hawks.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_Rivette
• Jacques Rozier
  Jacques Rozier (born in 1926 in Paris) is a French film director and screenwriter. He is one of the lesser known members of the French New Wave movement and has collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard. Three of his films have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1978, he was a member of the jury at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.
  
  
  
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  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949). His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, Édith Piaf and Raymond Radiguet.
  Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a village near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
  
  wn.com/Jean_Cocteau
• Jean Eustache
  Jean Eustache (November 30, 1938 – November 3, 1981) was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.
  In his obituary for Eustache, the influential critic Serge Daney wrote:
  "In the thread of the desolate 70s, his films succeeded one another, always unforeseen, without a system, without a gap: film-rivers, short films, TV programs, hyperreal fiction. Each film went to the end of its material, from real to fictional sorrow. It was impossible for him to go against it, to calculate, to take cultural success into account, impossible for this theoretician of seduction to seduce an audience."
  Jim Jarmusch dedicated his 2005 film Broken Flowers to Eustache.
  Eustache was born in Pessac, Gironde, France into a working class family. Relatively little information exists about Eustache’s life prior to the time he became a member of the Cahiers du cinéma coterie in the late fifties, though it is known that he was largely self-educated and worked in the railroad service prior to becoming a filmmaker. Information suggests that the mystery surrounding his youth was intentional, with sources stating that "during his lifetime Eustache published little information about his early years, indicating that he felt no nostalgia for an unhappy childhood.".
  
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  Jean Luc Godard
  Jean-Luc Godard (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement La Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave".
  Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation." To challenge this tradition, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema.^{[citation needed]} He is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s. Several of his films express his political views.His films express his knowledge of film history through their references to earlier films. In addition, Godard's films often cite existentialism, as he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy.^{[citation needed]} His radical approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him an influential filmmaker of the French New Wave.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Luc_Godard
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  Jean Vigo
  Jean Vigo (26 April 1905, Paris – 5 October 1934) was a French film director, who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
  Vigo was born to Emily Clero and the prominent Spanish/Catalan militant anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés (who adopted the name Miguel Almereyda - an anagram of "y'a la merde", which translates as "there's the shit"). Much of his early life was spent on the run with his parents. His father was strangled in his cell in Fresnes Prison on the night of 13 August 1917; allegedly the authorities were responsible. The young Vigo was subsequently sent to boarding school under an assumed name, Jean Sales, to conceal his identity.
  Vigo was married and had a daughter, Luce Vigo (a film critic) in 1931. He died in 1934 of complications from tuberculosis, which he had contracted eight years earlier.
  Vigo is noted for two films which affected the future development of both French and world cinema: Zéro de conduite (1933) and L'Atalante (1934). Zéro de conduite was approvingly described by critic David Thomson as "forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot anarchic crescendo." L'Atalante was Vigo's only full-length feature; the simple story of a newly-married couple splitting and reuniting is notable for the way it effortlessly merges rough, naturalistic filmmaking with shimmering, dreamlike sequences and effects. Thomson described the result as "not so much a masterpiece as a definition of cinema, and thus a film that stands resolutely apart from the great body of films."
  
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  Jeanne Moreau
  Jeanne Moreau (French pronunciation: [ʒan mɔˈʁo]; born 23 January 1928) is a French actress, singer, screenwriter and director. She is the recipient of a César Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress and a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for individual performances, and several lifetime awards.
  Moreau made her theatrical debut in 1947, and established herself as one of the leading actresses of the Comédie-Française. She began playing small roles in films in 1949 and eventually achieved prominence as the star of Lift to the Scaffold (UK)/Elevator to the Gallows (USA) (1958), directed by Louis Malle and Jules et Jim (1962), directed by François Truffaut. Most prolific during the 1960s, Moreau continues to appear in films to the present day.
  Moreau was born in Paris, the daughter of Katherine (née Buckley), a dancer who performed at the Folies Bergère, and Anatole-Désiré Moreau, a restaurateur. Moreau's father was French and her mother was English, a native of Lancashire in England and of part-Irish descent. Moreau's father was Catholic and her mother, originally a Protestant, converted to Catholicism upon marriage. When a young girl, "the family moved south to Vichy, spending vacations at the ancestral village of Mazirat, a town of 30 houses in a valley in the Allier. 'It was wonderful there,' Jeanne says. 'Every tombstone in the cemetery was for a Moreau.'" During the war, the family was split and Moreau lived with her mother in Paris. Moreau ultimately lost interest in school at age 16 and, after attending Jean Anouilh's Antigone, found her calling as an actor. She later studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. Her parents separated permanently while Moreau was at the conservatory and her mother, "after 24 difficult years in France, returned to England with Jeanne's younger^{[citation needed]} sister, Michelle."
  
  wn.com/Jeanne_Moreau
• John Schlesinger
  John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director and actor.
  Schlesinger was born in London into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor.
  Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre and The Vise. He began his directorial career in 1956 with the short documentary Sunday in the Park about London's Hyde Park. In 1959 he was credited as exterior or second unit director on 23 episodes of the TV series The Four Just Men and four 30-minute episodes of the series Danger Man.
  By the 1960s, he had virtually given up acting to concentrate on a directing career, and another of his earlier directorial efforts, the British Transport Films' documentary Terminus (1961), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.
  
  wn.com/John_Schlesinger
• Joseph Losey
  Joseph Walton Losey (January 14, 1909, La Crosse, Wisconsin – June 22, 1984, London) was an American theater and film director. After studying in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, Losey returned to the United States, eventually making his way to Hollywood. In the 1950s Losey was blacklisted in the United States and moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.
  During the McCarthy Era, Losey was named during hearings of the HUAC for his supposed ties with the Communist Party. Although he was never officially blacklisted, his career in the US declined, and he moved to England to continue working as a director.
  Even in the UK, he experienced problems: his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger, a 1954 film noir crime thriller, bore the pseudonym Victor Hanbury, rather than his own name, in the credits as director, as the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted in Hollywood due to working on a film he directed. He was also originally slated to direct the 1956 Hammer Films production X the Unknown; however, after a few days work on the project, star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was moved off the project.
  
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  Kathryn Bigelow
  Kathryn Ann Bigelow (born November 27, 1951) is an American film director, film producer, screenwriter and television director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark (1987), the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break (1991), the science fiction/film noir Strange Days (1995), the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water (2000) and the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008). The Hurt Locker won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture, won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and was nominated for the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Drama.
  With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director. She also became the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director in 1995 for Strange Days.
  In April 2010, Bigelow was named to the Time 100 list of most influential people of the year.
  Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, United States, the only child of a paint factory manager and a librarian. Her early creative endeavors were as a student of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study scholarship program in New York City. Bigelow’s early work benefited from her apprenticeships with Vito Acconi, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.
  
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  Kenneth Branagh
  Kenneth Charles Branagh (/ˈbrænə/ BRAN-ə; born 10 December 1960) is an actor and film director from Northern Ireland. He is best known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays including Henry V (1989) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello, Hamlet (1996) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006).
  He has also starred in numerous other films and television series including Fortunes of War (1987), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Conspiracy (TV) (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (TV) (2005), Valkyrie (2008), Wallander (TV series) (2008–present), and My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Laurence Olivier (Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor); and directed such notable films as Dead Again (1991) (also starring), Swan Song (1992) (Academy Award nominated for Best Live Action Short Film), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) (also starring), The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), and the blockbuster action film Thor (2011).
  
  wn.com/Kenneth_Branagh
• Louis Malle
  Louis Malle (30 October 1932 – 23 November 1995) was an award-winning French film director, screenwriter, and producer. His film, Le Monde du silence, won the Palme d'Or and Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1956. He was also nominated multiple times for Academy Awards later in his career.
  Malle worked in both French cinema and Hollywood, and he produced both French and English language films. His most famous films include Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), Atlantic City (1981), and Au revoir, les enfants (1987).
  Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries, Nord, France. He initially studied political science at the Sciences-Po before turning to film studies at IDHEC instead.
  He worked as the co-director and cameraman to Jacques Cousteau on the Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning (at the 1956 Academy Awards and Cannes Film Festival respectively) documentary The Silent World (1956) and assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped (French title: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, 1956) before making his first feature, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (released in the U.K. as Lift to the Scaffold and in the U.S. originally as Frantic, later as Elevator to the Gallows) in 1957. A taut thriller featuring an original score by Miles Davis, the film made an international film star of Jeanne Moreau, at the time a leading stage actress of the state Comédie-Française. Malle was 24 years old.
  
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  Luc Besson
  Luc Besson (French pronunciation: [lyk bɛsɔ̃]; born 18 March 1959) is a French film director, writer, and producer. He is the creator of EuropaCorp film company. He has been involved with more than 50 films, spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer.
  Besson was born in Paris to parents who were both Club Med scuba diving instructors. This had a profound influence on his childhood as Besson planned on becoming a marine biologist. He spent much of his youth traveling with his parents to tourist resorts in Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. The family returned to France when Besson was 10. His parents promptly divorced and were remarried to other people. "Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn't work," he said in the International Herald Tribune. "And if I disappear, then everything is perfect. The rage to exist comes from here. I have to do something! Otherwise I am going to die."
  At the age of 17, Besson had a diving accident that left him unable to dive.
  
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  Luc Moullet
  Luc Moullet (b. 14 October 1937 in Paris) is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.
  Though such influential filmmakers and critics as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Jacques Rivette and Jonathan Rosenbaum have consistently praised his work, he has never found commercial success, even in his native France.
  Moullet is known to frequently act in his movies.
  Moullet began writing for Cahiers du cinéma at the age of eighteen, where he was an early champion of the films of Samuel Fuller. Though reportedly initially disliked by François Truffaut, the brash critic found a defender in a young Jean-Luc Godard. In one of his articles for the Cahiers (published in the March 1959) Moullet stated that "Morality is a question of tracking shots", a phrase which, along with Jean-Luc Godard's alternative, formulated shortly afterwards ("Traveling shots are a question of morality"), has since become well-known in French cinema studies.
  
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  Marguerite Duras
  Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras (pronounced: [maʁ.ɡə.ʁit dy.ʁas]) (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director.
  She was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony.
  Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her ten children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subsequent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period.
  
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  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
  Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.
  
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  Michael Radford
  Michael Radford (born 24 February 1946) is an English film director and screenwriter.
  Radford was born on 24 February 1946, in New Delhi, India, to a British father and an Austrian Jewish mother. He was educated at Bedford School before attending Worcester College, Oxford. After teaching for a few years, he went to the National Film and Television School, becoming a student there in its inaugural year.
  Between 1976 and 1982 Radford worked as a documentary film maker, mostly on projects for the BBC, covering subjects such as Scottish islanders on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides who believe in the literal truth of the Bible: The Last Stronghold of the Pure Gospel; the soprano Isobel Buchanan: La Belle Isobel; the singer songwriter Van Morrison: Van Morrison in Ireland; and the self-explanatory The Making of The Pirates of Penzance. On the last two of these Radford worked with the cinematographer Roger Deakins, who would later shoot two of Radford's feature films; 1984 and White Mischief. Also remarkable in his early production was 'Another time, another place' (1982), a feature film set in Scotland during WWII and centered around a love story between a local woman and an Italian POW.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Radford
• Michel Deville
  Michel Deville (born 13 April 1931) is a French film director and screenwriter.
  Deville started his filmmaking career in the late 1950s, paralleling the emergence of the French New Wave directors. He never achieved the level of critical and international recognition of some of his contemporaries such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Chabrol, possibly because of his more conventional filmmaking style. Nevertheless his films, especially his comedies from the 1970s and 1980s, were popular in his native France.^{[citation needed]}
  One of Deville's comedies, La Lectrice ("The Reader") was probably his biggest success with international audiences. La Lectrice is about a woman (played by Miou-Miou), who finds work reading novels for the blind but gradually finds herself unwittingly attracting a clientele of fetishists who enjoyed being read to. At one time his films were difficult to find in North America but presently(2007) seven of his films are available in DVD in the U.S.
  His 1980 film Le Voyage en douce was entered into the 30th Berlin International Film Festival. Five years later, his film Death in a French Garden was entered into the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.
  
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  Michel Hazanavicius
  Michel Hazanavicius (French pronunciation: [mi.ʃɛl a.za.na.vi.sjys]; born 29 March 1967) is a French film director, producer and screenwriter best known for his 2011 film, The Artist, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards. It also won him the Academy Award for Best Director. He also directed spy movie parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.
  Michel Hazanavicius was born into a Jewish family from Lithuania; his grandparents settled in France in the 1920s. Before directing films, Hazanavicius worked in television, beginning with the Canal+ channel, where he started as a director in 1988. He began directing commercials for companies such as Reebok and Bouygues Telecom, and then, in 1993, he made his first feature-length film, La Classe américaine, for television. The film, co-directed with Dominique Mézerette, consisted entirely of footage taken from various films produced by the Warner Bros. studio, re-edited and dubbed into French. In 1997, Hazanavicius directed his first short film, Echec au capital, and followed it up with his first theatrically released feature, Mes amis, which starred his brother, actor Serge Hazanavicius.
  
  wn.com/Michel_Hazanavicius
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  Mike Leigh
  Mike Leigh, OBE (born 20 February 1943) is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between work for the theatre and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterized by a gritty "kitchen sink realism" style. His well-known films include Life is Sweet (1990), the comedy-drama Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy (1999), and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are arguably Naked (1993) for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and Golden Lion winner Vera Drake (2004).
  
  wn.com/Mike_Leigh
• Mike Nichols
  Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931) is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate. His other noteworthy films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, Closer and the TV mini-series Angels in America. He also staged the original theatrical productions of Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Spamalot.
  Nichols is one of a small group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. His other honors include the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.
  Mike Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte (née Landauer) and Paul Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family that had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. His mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother. He moved to the United States to flee the Nazis on April 28, 1939. His father, who had changed his name to Paul Nichols, had successfully set up a medical practice in Manhattan and the family lived near Central Park. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from Walden High School, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago.
  
  wn.com/Mike_Nichols
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  Miles Davis
  Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.
  Miles Dewey Davis was born on May 26, 1926, to an affluent African American family in Alton, Illinois. His father, Dr. Miles Henry Davis, was a dentist. In 1927 the family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois. They also owned a substantial ranch in northern Arkansas, where Davis learned to ride horses as a boy.
  Davis' mother, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, wanted her son to learn the piano; she was a capable blues pianist but kept this fact hidden from her son. His musical studies began at 13, when his father gave him a trumpet and arranged lessons with local musician Elwood Buchanan. Davis later suggested that his father's instrument choice was made largely to irk his wife, who disliked the trumpet's sound. Against the fashion of the time, Buchanan stressed the importance of playing without vibrato; he was reported to have slapped Davis' knuckles every time he started using heavy vibrato. Davis would carry his clear signature tone throughout his career. He once remarked on its importance to him, saying, "I prefer a round sound with no attitude in it, like a round voice with not too much tremolo and not too much bass. Just right in the middle. If I can’t get that sound I can’t play anything."Clark Terry was another important early influence.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Miloš Forman
  Jan Tomáš Forman (Czech pronunciation: [ˈjan ˈtomaːʃ ˈforman]; born February 18, 1932), known as Miloš Forman ([ˈmɪloʃ ˈforman], English /ˈmiːloʊʃ ˈfɔərmən/), is a Czech-American director, screenwriter, professor, and an emigrant from Czechoslovakia. Two of his films, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, are among the most celebrated in the history of film, both gaining him the Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated for the same award for The People vs. Larry Flynt. He also won Golden Globe, Cannes, Berlinale, BAFTA, Cesar, David di Donatello, European Film Academy, and Czech Lion awards.
  Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic), the son of Anna (née Švábová), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. His parents were Protestants. During the Nazi occupation a member of the anti-Nazi Underground named Forman's father as a member of the Underground while being interrogated by the Gestapo. His father was arrested for distributing banned books and died in Buchenwald in 1944. His mother died in Auschwitz in 1943. Forman has stated that he did not fully understand what had happened to his parents until he saw footage of the concentration camps when he was 16.
  
  wn.com/Miloš_Forman
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  Oliver Stone
  William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. He won further attention - and controversy - with films JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Stone's movies frequently focus on contemporary political and cultural issues. He has received three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), and Best Director for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). British newspaper The Guardian described Stone as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema." Stone's films often combine different cameras and film formats within a single scene (including VHS and 8 mm film) as evidenced in JFK and Natural Born Killers.
  
  wn.com/Oliver_Stone
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  Patrice Chéreau
  Patrice Chéreau (pronounced: [pa.tʁis ʃe.ʁo]; born 2 November 1944) is a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor, and producer.
  Patrice Chéreau was born in Lézigné, Maine-et-Loire, and went to school in Paris. At a young age he became well-known to Parisian critics as director, actor, and stage manager of his high-school theatre (lycée Louis-le-Grand). At 15, he was enthusiastically celebrated as a theatre prodigy. In 1964, at the age of 19, he began directing for the professional theatre. In 1966 he created a very busy Public-Theatre at the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville. In 1969, he staged his first opera. The following year he established a close relationship with the leadership of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. In 1975 he worked in Germany for the first time directing Edward Bond's Lear. He often collaborated with Claude Stratz. He began his relationship with his lover and favorite actor Pascal Greggory in 1987.
  Chereau's most discussed production was his 1976 centennial staging of Richard Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Polarizing fans and critics, Chereau chose to set the operas during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, and was thought to have emphasized the dramatic rather than the musical elements of the works.
  
  wn.com/Patrice_Chéreau
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  Patrice Leconte
  Patrice Leconte (born November 12, 1947, in Paris, France) is a French film director, actor, comic strip writer, and screenwriter.
  Leconte grew up in Tours, and began making little amateur films at 15. He went to Paris in 1967 and studied at Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. While attending film school in the late 1960s, Leconte also worked as cartoonist, in particular for the magazine Pilote. He directed his first feature film in 1976, and had a number of major successes with comedy films that were barely distributed outside France. He first came to international attention in 1989 with Monsieur Hire, which was shown at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and which was a radical departure from his previous work. Although he had already directed more than half a dozen features, many foreign critics, unfamiliar with his previous work, essentially treated him as a newcomer. Since then, he has alternated between films such as Ridicule and L'homme du train which have had success in the international arthouse market, and others, like Les grands ducs, whose appeal has been limited to France.
  
  wn.com/Patrice_Leconte
• Patrick Modiano
  Patrick Modiano (Italian: Patrizio Modiano; born 30 July 1945) is a French novelist. He is a winner of the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972, the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for his novel Rue des boutiques obscures. Modiano was honored with the prestigious 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for his lifetime achievement.
  Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt of a father of Jewish Italian origins and a Belgian mother, Louisa Colpijn (actress). Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began their relationship in semi-clandestinity. Modiano's childhood took place in a unique atmosphere: between the absence of his father—of which he heard many troubled stories—and his mother's frequent tours, he had to complete his secondary education by government aid. This brought him closer to his brother, Rudy, who died of a disease at age 10 (the works of Patrick Modiano from 1967 to 1982 are dedicated to him). This disappearance announced the end of the author's childhood, who continued to hold a marked nostalgia for this period.
  
  wn.com/Patrick_Modiano
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  Paul Greengrass
  Paul Greengrass (born 13 August 1955) is an English film director, screenwriter and former journalist. He specialises in dramatisations of real-life events and is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras.
  Greengrass was born in Cheam, Surrey. His mother was a teacher and his father a river pilot and merchant seaman. He is the brother of noted English historian Mark Greengrass. Greengrass was educated at Westcourt Primary School and Gravesend Grammar School, Sevenoaks School and Queens' College, Cambridge. He first worked as a director in the 1980s, for the ITV current affairs programme World in Action; he is related to Victoria Greengrass. His investigation of timber-framed house construction has been cited as preventing its widespread adoption in England. At the same time he co-authored the notorious book Spycatcher with Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, which contained enough sensitive information that the British Government made an unsuccessful attempt to ban it. He then moved into drama, directing made-for-television films such as The One That Got Away, based on Chris Ryan's book about SAS actions in the Gulf War, and The Fix, based on the story of the betting scandal which shook British football in 1964.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Greengrass
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  Pedro Almodóvar
  Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo almoˈðoβar kaβaˈʎeɾo]; born 25 September 1949) is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.
  Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors and glossy décor. Desire, passion, family and identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent themes. His films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema.
  He founded Spanish film production company El Deseo S.A. with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar who has produced almost all of Pedro’s films. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
  Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.
  
  wn.com/Pedro_Almodóvar
• 
  Peter Jackson
  Sir Peter Robert Jackson, KNZM (born 31 October 1961) is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, who is well known for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001 to 2003), adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
  He won international attention early in his career with his "splatstick" horror comedies beginning with Bad Taste (1987) before coming to mainstream prominence with Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which he shared an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination with his wife, Fran Walsh. Jackson has been awarded three Academy Awards in his career, including the award for Best Director in 2003; he also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and Saturn Award for Best Direction the same year.
  His films also include Meet the Feebles (1989), Braindead (1992), Forgotten Silver (1995), The Frighteners (1996), King Kong (2005),The Lovely Bones (2009), and the upcoming The Lord of the Rings prequels The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2013). He is also the producer of District 9 (2009) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
  
  wn.com/Peter_Jackson
• 
  Peter Weir
  Peter Lindsay Weir, AM (born 21 August 1944) is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office hits—including the Academy Award nominees Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.
  Weir was born in Sydney, the son of Peggy (née Barnsley) and Lindsay Weir, a real estate agent. Weir attended The Scots College and Vaucluse Boys' High School before studying art and law at the University of Sydney. His interest in film was sparked by his meeting with fellow students, including Phillip Noyce and the future members of the Sydney filmmaking collective Ubu Films.
  After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7, where he worked as a production assistant on the groundbreaking satirical comedy program The Mavis Bramston Show. During this period, using station facilities, he made his first two experimental short films, Count Vim's Last Exercise and The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Weir
• Pierre Braunberger
  Pierre Braunberger (29 July 1905, Paris – 17 November 1990) was a French producer, executive producer, and actor.
  Born into a family of doctors, Braunberger at the age of seven was already determined not have the same life as his father, and not to take up medicine as a career. He saw a screening of Fantômas at the Gaumont Théâtre, the first cinema to open in Paris, and decided to work in the cinema.
  After the First World War, at the age of 15, he produced and directed his first film: Frankfurt in Germany. He left for successive adventures in Berlin, London at Brocklis establishments, where he worked.
  In 1923, he left for New York (U.S.A.), where he worked for a few weeks at Fox Film Corporation, and became a director of production along with Ferdinand H. Adam where he also worked on films with Frank Merrill.
  In the course of his films in Los Angeles, he came to know Irving Thalberg who employed him at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as one of his assistants. He stayed there for eighteen months, and established contacts with one the greatest directors of the time.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Braunberger
• 
  Potter Stewart
  Potter Stewart (January 23, 1915 – December 7, 1985) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. During his tenure, he made, among other areas, major contributions to criminal justice reform, civil rights, access to the courts, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
  Stewart was born in Jackson, Michigan, approximately 30 miles (50 km) south of Lansing, Michigan, while his family was on vacation. His father, James Garfield Stewart, a prominent Republican from Cincinnati, Ohio, served as mayor of Cincinnati for seven years and was later a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court.
  Potter Stewart attended the Hotchkiss School, graduating in 1933. Then, he went on to Yale University, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Skull and Bones graduating class of 1937. He was awarded Phi Beta Kappa and served as chairman of the Yale Daily News. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1941, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and a member of Phi Delta Phi. Other members of that era included Gerald R. Ford, Peter H. Dominick, Walter Lord, William Scranton, R. Sargent Shriver, Cyrus R. Vance, and Byron R. White. The last would later become his colleague on the US Supreme Court.
  
  wn.com/Potter_Stewart
• Raymond Queneau
  Raymond Queneau (French pronunciation: [ʁɛ'mɔ̃ kə'no]; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo).
  Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. He received his first baccalauréat in 1919 for Latin and Greek, and a second in 1920 for philosophy, then studied at the Sorbonne (1921–1923) where he was a fair student of both letters and mathematics, graduating with certificates in philosophy and psychology.
  Queneau performed military service as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–1926. He was drafted in 1939 after Germany's invasion of Poland, but he was demobilized in 1940. Through the remainder of World War II, he and his family lived with the painter Élie Lascaux in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.
  He married Janine Kahn in 1928, with whom he had a son, Jean-Marie, in 1934. They remained married until Janine's death in 1972.
  Queneau spent much of his life working for the Gallimard publishing house, where he began as a reader in 1938. He later rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956. During some of this time, he also taught at l'École Nouvelle de Neuilly. He entered the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 1950, where he became Satrap.
  
  wn.com/Raymond_Queneau
• 
  Richard Attenborough
  Richard Samuel Attenborough, Baron Attenborough ( /ˈætənbərə/), CBE (born 29 August 1923) is an English actor, director, producer and entrepreneur. He is the current President of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
  As a film director and producer, he won two Academy Awards for Gandhi in 1982. He has also won four BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. As an actor he is perhaps best known for his roles in Brighton Rock, The Great Escape, 10 Rillington Place, Miracle on 34th Street and Jurassic Park.
  He is the elder brother of naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough.
  Attenborough was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, the eldest of three sons of Mary Attenborough (née Clegg) a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council, and Frederick Levi Attenborough, a scholar and academic administrator who was a don at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and wrote a standard text on Anglo-Saxon law. Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and at RADA. During the Second World War Attenborough served in the Royal Air Force.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Attenborough
• 
  Robert Altman
  Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925 – November 20, 2006) was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.
  His films MASH (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
  Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Helen (née Matthews), a Mayflower descendant from Nebraska, and Bernard Clement Altman, a wealthy insurance salesman and amateur gambler, who came from an upper-class family. Altman's ancestry was German, English and Irish; his paternal grandfather, Frank Altman, Sr., anglicized the spelling of the family name from "Altmann" to "Altman". Altman had a Catholic upbringing, but he did not continue to practice as a Catholic as an adult, although he has been referred to as "a sort of Catholic" and a Catholic director. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City. He graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1943.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Altman
• 
  Robert Bresson
  Robert Bresson (pronounced [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛˈsɔ̃] in French; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the French New Wave. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir. As Jean-Luc Godard said, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music."
  Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth (née Clausels) and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life, and the year of his birth – 1901 or 1907 – varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and turned to painting after graduating. Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films - Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war.
  Initially also a photographer, Bresson made his first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. During World War II, he spent over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp - an experience which informs Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped). In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his meticulous approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations.^{[citation needed]} Difficulty finding funding for his projects was also a factor.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Bresson
• Roger Vadim
  Roger Vadim (26 January 1928 – 11 February 2000) was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and sometime actor, best known for launching the career of his first wife, Brigitte Bardot, with his 1956 film And God Created Woman.
  Vadim was born as Roger Vladimir Plemiannikov in Paris. His Russian father, Igor Nikolaevich Plemiannikov (Russian: И́горь Никола́евич Племя́нников), had immigrated from Ukraine and became a naturalized French citizen, and was a vice consul of France to Egypt. His mother, Marie-Antoinette Ardilouze, was a French actress. Although Vadim lived in luxury in his early youth, the death of his father, in front of Vadim when he was nine, caused the family to return to France, where his mother found work running a hostel in the French Alps which served as a way-station for Jews and other fugitives fleeing Nazi Germany.
  Vadim became a stage actor at the age of sixteen, after studying journalism and writing at the University of Paris, from which he did not graduate. In 1947, he became assistant to film director Marc Allégret, whom he met while working at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, and for whom he worked on several screenplays. Vadim then raised the funds to produce and direct his first film, And God Created Woman, starring Bardot, the profits from which made him wealthy. They went on to make two more films together, both of which featured Bardot as a sexpot.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Vadim
• 
  Roman Polanski
  Roman Polanski (born 18 August 1933) is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers." Polanski's films have inspired diverse directors, including the Coen brothers,Atom Egoyan,Darren Aronofsky,Park Chan-wook,Abel Ferrara, and Wes Craven.
  Born in Paris to Polish parents, he moved with his family back to Poland in 1937, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Holocaust and was educated in Poland and became a director of both art house and commercial films. Polanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water (1962), made in Poland, was nominated for a United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but was beaten by Federico Fellini's 8½. He has since received five more Oscar nominations, along with two Baftas, four Césars, a Golden Globe Award and the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival in France. In the United Kingdom he directed three films, beginning with Repulsion (1965). In 1968 he moved to the United States, and cemented his status by directing the Oscar-winning horror film Rosemary's Baby (1968).
  
  wn.com/Roman_Polanski
• 
  Stanley Kubrick
  Stanley Kubrick (/ˈkuːbrɪk/; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor. He is regarded as having been one of America's greatest filmmakers. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, were noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to details to achieve realism and an inspired use of music scores. Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, black comedy, horror and science fiction. Kubrick was also noted for being a perfectionist, using painstaking care with scene staging and working closely with his actors.
  Starting out as a photographer in New York City, he taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating high school. His earliest films were made on a shoestring budget, followed by one Hollywood blockbuster, after which he spent most of the rest of his career living and filming in England. His home became his workplace where he did his writing, research, editing and management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios.
  
  wn.com/Stanley_Kubrick
• 
  Steven Spielberg
  Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
  Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Spielberg
• 
  Tonie Marshall
  Tonie Marshall (born 29 November 1951 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France) is an actress, screenwriter, and film director in French cinema.
  She is the daughter of American actor William Marshall and French actress, Micheline Presle and the half-sister of actor Mike Marshall.
  In 1994, her film Pas très catholique was entered into the 44th Berlin International Film Festival.
  Her 1999 film Venus Beauty Institute (Vénus beauté (institut)) won the 2000 César Award for Best Film and she won the César Award for Best Director and for Best Writing - Original or Adaptation.
  In 2002 her film Au plus près du paradis was nominated for the Golden Lion Award as best film at the Venice Film Festival.
  Marshall is a signatory of the "Free Roman Polanski" Petition.
  
  wn.com/Tonie_Marshall
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• 
  Wim Wenders
  Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (born 14 August 1945) is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer. Since 1996, Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin.
  Wenders was born in Düsseldorf into a traditional Catholic family. His father, Heinrich Wenders, was a surgeon. Use of the Dutch name, "Wim", a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm/Willem", reflected his mother's Dutch provenance, but the Dutch version was rejected by the civil registration authorities in 1945 as "unGerman". He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine (1963–64) and philosophy (1964–65) in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he dropped out of university studies and moved to Paris in October 1966 to become a painter. Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school IDHEC (now La Fémis), and instead became an engraver in the studio of Johnny Friedlander, an American artist, in Montparnasse. During this time, Wenders became fascinated with cinema, and saw up to five movies a day at the local movie theater.
  
  wn.com/Wim_Wenders
• 
  Woody Allen
  Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
  He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
  By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."
  
  wn.com/Woody_Allen
• 
  Éric Rohmer
  Éric Rohmer (French: [eʁik ʁomɛʁ]; 1920–2010) was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma.
  Rohmer was the last of the French New Wave directors to become established. He worked as the editor of the Cahiers du cinéma periodical from 1957 to 1963, while most of his Cahiers colleagues – among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut – were beginning their careers and gaining international attention. René Schérer, a philosopher, is his brother and René Monzat, a journalist, is his son.
  Rohmer came to international attention around 1969 when his film Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's) was nominated at the Academy Awards. He won the San Sebastián International Film Festival with Claire's Knee in 1971. In 2001, Rohmer received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. His works were viewed by audiences around the world. He died of unspecified causes on 11 January 2010. In his obituary in The Daily Telegraph he was described as "the most durable film-maker of the French New Wave", outlasting his peers and "still making movies the public wanted to see" late in his career.
  
  wn.com/Éric_Rohmer

The Passions of Louis Malle (2003)

Genres

• Documentary

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