Arnaud Desplechin

Born in 1960 in Roubaix and pas­sion­ate about film, Arnaud Desplechin enrolled in the “direct­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy” sec­tion of IDHEC. He then start­ed out as a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy on sev­er­al short films. La Vie des morts, his first mid-length film, shot in 1991, won the Jean Vigo Prize. The fol­low­ing year, his first fea­ture film, The Sen­tinel, was select­ed by the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. He became the cen­tral fig­ure of young French cin­e­ma thanks to sev­er­al of his sub­se­quent films, includ­ing My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argu­ment (1996) and Esther Kahn (2000). In 2004, Arnaud Desplechin com­plet­ed Kings & Queen with Emmanuel Devos and Math­ieu Amal­ric, both a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial hit, with Math­ieu Amal­ric notably win­ning the César for Best Actor. In 2007, the film­mak­er shot the doc­u­men­tary The Beloved, in which he took on his family’s secrets. He then cast Cather­ine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Rous­sil­lon in his dra­mat­ic com­e­dy A Christ­mas Tale (2008). In 2013, he went to the Unit­ed States to shoot Jim­my P.: Psy­chother­a­py of a Plains Indi­an, reunit­ing with his favorite actor Math­ieu Amal­ric, along­side Beni­cio del Toro. In 2016, he won the César for Best Direc­tor for My Gold­en Days. Arnaud Desplechin went on to stage a suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tion of August Strindberg’s “The Father” at the Comédie-Française, fol­lowed by Tony Kushner’s “Angels in Amer­i­ca.” In 2019, Oh Mer­cy!, like most of his pre­vi­ous films, was select­ed to play in com­pe­ti­tion at Cannes. His last fea­ture film Broth­er and Sis­ter also debuted on the Croisette this year.