In just over a decade, Francois Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Femis, Ozon made a ...number of critically acclaimed shorts in the 1990s and released his first feature film Sitcom in 1998. Two additional shorts and eleven feature films have followed, including international successes 8 femmes and Swimming Pool and more recent releases such as Angel, Ricky, and Le refuge. Ozon's originality lies in his filmmaking style, which draws on familiar cinematic traditions (the crime thriller, the musical, the psychological drama, the comedy, the period piece) but simultaneously mixes these recognizable genres and renders them unfamiliar. Despite tremendous diversity in cinematic choices, Ozon's oeuvre is surprisingly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. _x000B__x000B_Thibaut Schilt provides an overview of Francois Ozon's career to date, highlighting the director's unrestrained, voracious cinephilia, his recurrent collaborations with women screenwriters and actresses, and the trademarks of his cinema including music, dance, and the clothes that accompany these now typically Ozonian episodes. Schilt contextualizes Ozon's filmmaking within the larger fields of French filmmaking and international queer cinema, and he discusses several major themes running through Ozon's work, including obsessions with inadequate fathers, various types of mourning, and a recurring taste for "the foreign." The volume also includes an insightful interview with the director.
The controversies surrounding the adoption of the pacte civil de solidarité and similar European debates in the late 1990s coincide with a revival of the road movie format in the cinema of France and ...its neighbours. The border-crossing inclinations of road movies generate an often polyglot battery of films that tackle questions of identity, kinship and citizenship from a transnational perspective. This article focuses on three French-language, queer-themed, border-crossing road movies: Plein sud/Going South (Sébastien Lifshitz, dir.,
2009a
), Origine contrôlée/Made in France (Ahmed Bouchaala and Zakia Tahri, dir.,
2001
) and Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, dir.,
2006
). These films, and the recent vogue in French and European road movies in general, correspond to a period marked by identity debates and the decreasing relevance of the traditional fabric of citizenship. Beyond the evident questioning of the patriarchal system and the staging of quests of individual agency and self-discovery, these films offer unique twists on the return to 'origins' narrative. While each journey takes a different direction (towards Spain, Algeria/Switzerland and Poland, respectively), it is the road itself that enables the fluid construction of selfhood. We examine in particular how the queering of each protagonist informs the relationships that these narratives entertain with wider identity debates, whether racial, national, ethnic or religious.
This article proposes a reading of Le Grand Voyage. This road movie recounts the 3000-mile-long automobile journey from Provence to Mecca of a Muslim father and his agnostic French-born son. An ...atypical road movie in many ways, it aims to challenge Western preconceived notions about the Muslim world and, to paraphrase the director, to rehabilitate the smeared reputation of Islam. While the film does not perhaps defy stereotypes about woman's position within this world, the emotive voice of Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui in the last scene may suggest that the female role will become more prominent in the next generation.
When François Ozon’s full-length film Sitcom débuted in 1998, he had already earned a solid reputation as a talented and innovative short film director. In 1996 the fifteen-minute Une robe d’été (A ...Summer Dress) received awards at festivals in Brest, Grenoble, Pantin, Dublin, Geneva, Los Angeles, and Locarno; was shown at the Cannes film festival; and earned a nomination for a César (France’s equivalent of the Oscar). That same year, one commentator wrote, speaking of Ozon and fellow filmmaker Laurent Cantet: “Any informed film festival organizer would bet his mother’s life on the cinematic future of these two” (Malandrin 12).
The Quebec film industry has gained significant momentum in the past three decades, in part thanks to the international recognition of the films of Deny Arcand and a handful of others. Despite ...obstacles, Quebec cinema is now increasingly recognised as a successful example of North American, French-language resistance to the hegemony of Hollywood (Jean 2005: 11). Since the 1990s films produced in the province have arguably been less visibly preoccupied with defining Québécois identity, as opposed to films made during both the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s and the sovereignty debates in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, contemporary directors from
