TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Germany
Key Genres: Drama, Romance, Marriage Drama, Romantic Drama, Family Drama, Melodrama
Key Collaborators: Marion Monnier (Editor), David Thion (Producer), Philippe Martin (Producer), Denis Lenoir (Cinematographer), Charles Gillibert (Producer), Pascal Auffray (Cinematographer), Roman Kolinka (Leading Character Actor), Sarah Le Picard (Leading Character Actress), André Marcon (Leading Character Actor), Anna Falguères (Production Designer), Magne-Håvard Brekke (Character Actor)

"Hansen-Løve has always found supportive partnerships, and her eight features to date are all personal projects, from her own original screenplays, and have all been made independently (i.e. without backing from huge media conglomerates). In today’s increasingly art-fearing movie production climate, her resolutely curious and inventive output amounts to an unequivocal feat to be celebrated." - Gabe Klinger (Metrograph, 2023)

"Mia Hansen-Løve makes delicate, graceful films about overpowering emotions. After beginning her career in front of the camera, acting in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (1998) and Les destinées (2000) as a teenager, she transitioned to directing at the age of twenty-six with All is Forgiven (2007), the first in a series of quietly devastating family dramas that established her as one of French cinema’s most sensitive young storytellers. In all of her work, she captures people in turbulent moments in their lives, and her often autobiographical character studies bring subtlety and insight to the exploration of grief, self-discovery, and youth’s fleeting pleasures." - Hillary Weston (The Criterion Collection, 2020)

"Having acted as a teenager in the films of Olivier Assayas (with whom, later on, she was in a relationship for 15 years), Hansen-Løve developed a refined understanding of what she desired from performers, a sensibility only bolstered by directing herself. Her brilliant second feature, Father of My Children (2009), zeroes in on the interior lives of a half dozen or so characters, as family members react to a crisis; each person is given space, empathy, quietude, and specificity… As a young filmmaker, Hansen-Løve surrounded herself with similarly young and inexperienced crew members, as well as lesser-known actors, giving herself the space to assert her chops behind the camera without fear. She learned how to communicate her preferences in prep and production for sophisticated, intellectual, and nuanced filmmaking." - David Canfield (Vanity Fair, 2022)

"Across her eight features, which frequently draw from her own life experiences, Mia Hansen-Løve has emerged as one of the foremost cinematic emissaries of the everyday. Her supreme talent lies not in the accumulation of events or emotions but in their juxtaposition." - Marshall Shaffer (Slant Magazine, 2023)

"By her own admission writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s style is difficult to define. She strives for filmmaking ‘transparency’, avoiding showy techniques in favour of a more subtle, understated approach – one that’s deeply felt and personal. Her films foreground character and mood, though often contain sudden, transformative incidents. They are something like the films of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer: intelligent and dialogue led, yet with an ardent emotional core. Like Rohmer, Hansen-Løve served as a critic at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. She admired the New Wave directors, who created their own cinematic language, and in unassuming fashion she has done the same, fashioning a delicate, individual style that’s intellectual, sensual and bittersweet." - David Morrison (BFI, 2021)

"Her preoccupation with time lends itself to long, naturalistic tracking shots, using the camera to capture the texture and shape of someone’s daily habits. She will watch someone’s tics and preoccupations play out in real time before reverting to the condensed simplicity of a montage, lending her filmography an almost hypnotic quality." - Anna McKibbin (Paste Magazine, 2023)

"All my films, in one way or another, use autobiographical elements. Or I should say biographical, because the majority are not inspired by my own story but those of people dear to me." - Mia Hansen-Løve (Observer, 2023)