TSPDT

Key Production Country: France
Key Genres: Drama, Teen Movie, Romantic Drama, Coming-of-Age, Childhood Drama, Psychological Drama
Key Collaborators: Bénédicte Couvreur (Producer), Julien Lacheray (Editor), Jean-Baptiste de Laubier (Composer), Crystel Fournier (Cinematographer), Thomas Grézaud (Production Designer), Christel Baras (Character Actress), Adèle Haenel (Leading Actress).

"Born in the Parisian suburbs, Sciamma wrote the script for her first film, Water Lilies, while she was still at school. The film, a tense, at times troubling drama about three teenage synchronised swimmers, was screened at Cannes and followed up with Tomboy, which tracked the adolescence of a gender-nonconforming child… The focus of Sciamma’s output is squarely on women, usually young women on the cusp of some major change – and how they look at themselves and each other." - Gwilym Mumford (The Guardian, 2020)

"She’s a firebrand on and off screen: co-director of the French Society of Film Directors, she was one of the organisers of the 2018 Cannes protest, when 82 women gathered on the red carpet to draw attention to the festival’s record of ignoring female directors. She is now advocating for 5050x2020, the campaign for gender parity in the film industry – focused, she notes, not on equal funding but on “equal representation in the room where the decisions are taken." - Isabel Stevens, BFI (2020)

"While never losing sight of the social surroundings (and restrictions) that condition or constrain her characters, Sciamma is more interested in actions than definitions; in what her women do rather than what they “are,” according to conventional classifications of sexual and gender fluidity." - Chloe Lizotte (Cinema Scope, 2020)

"With Portrait of Lady on Fire French director Céline Sciamma established herself as one of the most exciting and prominent filmmakers working. For those who have followed her career they will know that she has developed to this position through a series of groundbreaking films: groundbreaking because they foreground female friendship and desire with a cinematic storytelling which is as refreshing as it is enthralling. She also captures the frailties, intensities and insecurities of youth particularly in her early films and writing for other directors." - Watershed, 2020

"Céline fell in love with cinema when she was a teenager and started going to her town’s arthouse theatre three times a week, where she got an interested in reading film scripts and biographies of filmmakers. Céline pursued her studies in screenwriting at the major French film school – la Fémis. In 2007 she used her thesis screenplay to direct her first feature film Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres)." - ÉCU, 2014