Rebecca Zlotowski
French director, born in 1980 in Paris.
A former student of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure and having passed the enviable agrégation teaching qualification in modern literature, Rebecca Zlotowski discovered cinema through writing. A screenplay student at the Fémis, her desire was honed by lecturers such as Philippe Grandrieux or students like Teddy Lussi-Modeste, for whom she co-write Jimmy Rivière and The Price of Success. Her graduation-year film revealed her as a director: presented at the Critics’ Week, Belle Épine won the Louis-Delluc Prize in 2011 for Best First Film and earned Léa Seydoux a César Award nomination. Deconstructing and questioning stereotypes, her filmography focuses on subjects, places, and bodies that are rarely showcased on-screen: a nuclear power plant for the romance Grand Central; anti-Semitism through the lens of spiritualism in the period film Planetarium (with Natalie Portman, Lily-Rose Depp, and Emmanuel Salinger) ; the body of racialised and Rohmerian bimbo (Zahia Dehar) in An Easy Girl (SACD Prize at the Directors’ Fortnight – 2019); the first French president of Kabylian origins (Roschdy Zem) in the political series Savages; or a loving stepmother played by Virginie Efira in Other People’s Children.
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Belle Épine (2010) - Grand Central (2013) - Planetarium (2016) - An Easy Girl (2019) - Other People's Children (2022)