TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Belgium
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Avant-garde/Experimental, Surrealist Film, Crime Drama, Marriage Drama
Key Collaborators: Benoît Debie (Cinematographer), Brahim Chioua (Producer), Vincent Maraval (Producer), Philippe Nahon (Leading Actor), Edouard Weil (Producer), Denis Bedlow (Editor), Blandine Lenoir (Leading Actress), Frankie Pain (Leading Actress), Richard Grandpierre (Producer), Dominique Colin (Cinematographer), Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Editor), Thomas Bangalter (Composer)

"The son of the Argentine painter, writer, and intellectual Luis Felipe Noé, Gaspar grew up on a diet of foreign cinema, earning his fondness for hallucinatory cinema from the films of Stanley Kubrick… Though divisive and self-indulgent, there’s no doubt that Noé is a challenging filmmaker, creating movies that challenge the possibility of the medium whilst generating public shock at the very lengths he is willing to go to in order to recreate his artistic vision. There’s a method to the madness too, with each shocking gesture of his films being carefully engineered to awaken a concealed emotion from within the mind of the viewer.." - Calum Russell (Far Out Magazine, 2022)

"The poster boy of New French Extremity was anointed 20 years ago, the night his breakthrough film Irréversible debuted at Cannes and became notorious for depicting a nine-minute rape in full. It’s an agonising scene, preceded by another in which a man has his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher. Who knew bone could crumple like paper? Noé has been offending since, not least with his pornographic 3D outing Love and his LSD trip from hell Climax." - Annabel Nugent (The Independent, 2022)

"Gaspar Noé likes to push buttons. Through the past two decades, the Argentine filmmaker, who has long been based in France, has established a reputation as a visionary with a mischievous streak. His film Love (2015), which went viral on TikTok roughly five years after its theatrical release, features unsimulated sex scenes filmed in 3D. Irreversible (2002) will forever live in infamy for a 9-minute rape scene. In I Stand Alone (1998), a butcher punches the belly of his pregnant mistress. “Your baby’s hamburger meat now,” he says. “Ground beef!” And this comes long before Noé gives viewers 30 seconds warning so they can leave the screening." - Martin Tsai (AV Club, 2022)

"Gaspar Noé is a director, producer and screenwriter. He spent his youth travelling between Argentina, Paris and New York. He studied philosophy and film at the Ecole Louis Lumière in Paris. Noé’s feature debut I Stand Alone (1998) won the Mercedes-Benz Award in Cannes. With a large number of short films, documentaries and features, Noé often disrupts and disturbs the viewer." - IFFR

"The cinematic worlds of Gaspar Noé are bursting with people who, in the pursuit of ecstatic highs, sink to abominable lows. The depths into which the French filmmaker plunges his characters are typically fueled by drugs and sex, bathed in neon hues and characterized by exhilarating camera work that swoops in, around, below and on top of his subjects. Noé’s films can test the limits of even his most dedicated fans. In the 2018 Climax, a young boy accidentally drinks LSD-laced sangria. Love (2015) features exhausting, unsimulated sex — in 3D. Then there’s 2009’s Enter the Void, a captivating, 161-minute hallucinatory trip, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, about a dying man looking back on his life." - Hau Chu (The Washington Post, 2022)

"Characterised by garish sex and violence, vibrant colours, pounding soundtracks and restless steadicam shots, ‘un film de Gaspar Noé’ remains an instantly recognisable spectacle. Championed as a unique voice in cinema by some, perceived as a mere provocateur by (many) others, Noé remains as controversial today as he was when he exploded onto the film scene 2 decades ago, with his feature debut I Stand Alone (1998) winning the International Critics’ Week Award at Cannes. This divisiveness can be traced back to 2 contradictory impulses that animate the work of the Argentinian-born, French-speaking filmmaker. On the one hand, Noé’s flashy filmmaking style shows a director tirelessly enthusiastic about the possibilities of the medium. On the other, his films explore extremes of violence, often veering into nihilistic territory." - Elena Lazic (BFI, 2019)

"I'm not careful about what my filmography is going to be. People who think of how the body of work is going to be exposed in a museum — the posterity for filmmakers is very different from the posterity for a painter. My father is a painter, and he's very worried about how his paintings are going to be shown after his death or during his lifetime." - Gaspar Noé (Slash Film (2022)