François Ozon
A French filmmaker who moves between genres while returning to desire, performance and family life.
François Ozon was born in Paris in 1967. He studied at La Fémis and attracted attention with short films that approached sexuality and family relationships through humour, provocation and unease.
His early features included “Sitcom” (1998) and “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” (2000), adapted from a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The musical mystery “8 Women” (2002) and the thriller “Swimming Pool” (2003) brought his work to a wider international audience.
Openly gay, Ozon has explored queer lives in films with very different moods. “Time to Leave” (2005) follows a young photographer facing death; “Summer of 85” (2020) recalls a teenage love affair; “Peter von Kant” (2022) reworks another Fassbinder story. His films often ask how desire changes the stories people tell about themselves.
“By the Grace of God” (2019), about survivors of abuse in the Catholic Church, won the Grand Jury Prize at Berlin. In 2025 he brought Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” to the screen, returning to questions of judgement and social exclusion through a story set in colonial Algeria.