Céline Sciamma
Her films make the experience of looking, belonging and desire central to stories about girls and women.
Céline Sciamma was born in Pontoise, France, in 1978. She grew up near Paris and studied screenwriting at La Fémis. Her graduation project developed into “Water Lilies” (2007), a first feature about desire and social hierarchies among teenage girls in synchronised swimming.
“Tomboy” (2011) follows a child who introduces themself to new neighbours as a boy. “Girlhood” (2014) centres on Black girls negotiating friendship and their place in the Paris suburbs. Across these films, identity emerges through gestures, clothes, relationships and the ways people are seen by others.
In “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019), a painter and her subject fall in love in eighteenth-century Brittany. The film won the screenplay prize at Cannes and the Queer Palm, bringing Sciamma an international audience. Looking becomes a reciprocal act rather than something one character simply does to another.
Openly lesbian, Sciamma has also campaigned for equality within the film industry. Her work as a screenwriter includes the animated “My Life as a Courgette” (2016). “Petite Maman” (2021) continued her exploration of childhood and intimacy through an encounter between generations.