Media Release

Tribute to... Award Goes to French Film Director Claire Denis Important exponent of contemporary European cinema

Zurich, September 29, 2014

This year’s Zurich Film Festival A Tribute to... award goes to the French screenwriter and film director Claire Denis. This will be the first time that a female French filmmaker has received a ZFF award. Claire Denis will collect the Golden Eye in person during the Award Night at Zurich Opera House on October 4. A retrospective comprising six representative productions offers a comprehensive insight into her work.

The French filmmaker Claire Denis has enriched contemporary cinema with her idiosyncratic works for over 25 years. This former assistant of such director greats as Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders has traversed conventional formal and narrative boundaries to develop her own highly individualistic visual language. Claire has long been regarded as one of the most important exponents of European cinema.

Close links with Africa

Claire Denis is a maker of feature, documentary and short films. There are biographical reasons why her cinematographic works share strong links with the African continent: Born in 1948, Claire Denis grew up the daughter of a colonial administrator in various African countries. Her semi-autobiographical debut film CHOCOLAT (1988) was set in Cameroon, her best-known work, BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), is a Foreign Legion drama set in Djibouti, and she returned to Africa again in 2009 with her drama WHITE MATERIAL.

Denis’ interests lie with the legacy of colonialism and being a foreigner, not only in foreign lands, but also in one’s own country. Her protagonists are marginalised characters: Outsiders, loners, the homeless and foreigners. Claire Denis’ films, however, are not primarily political or provocative; themes such as migration and racism are not handled explicitly, but surface in a more latent form. Her films always revolve around people.

Glances, gestures, body language

Claire Denis’ characters are elliptic; she replaces verbosity with glances, gestures and body language. On the formal level, her films blur the border between dreams and reality. She also chooses her soundtracks with the greatest of care, using the music of Bob Marley, Neil Young, Otis Redding and, repeatedly, the Tindersticks, which composed the soundtrack to her most recent film LES SALAUDS (2013), as well as WHITE MATERIAL (2009), 35 RHUMS (2008) and NÉNETTE ET BONI, which garnered the 1996 Golden Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival.

The ZFF retrospective screens the films CHOCOLAT (1988), NÉNETTE ET BONI (1996), BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), 35 RHUMS (2008), WHITE MATERIAL (2009) and LES SALAUDS (2013). The films can be seen at the Filmpodium and cinema corso 3.

Partner oft he Award Night is Credit Suisse.

Das 10. Zurich Film Festival findet vom 25. September bis 5. Oktober 2014 statt. Weitere Informationen finden Sie unter www.zff.com Herzlichen Dank an die Hauptsponsoren des ZFF 2014: Credit Suisse, upc cablecom, Die Schweizerische Post, Audi