Actress, screenwriter, and director, Valérie Donzelli has established herself as one of the most original voices in contemporary French cinema. Trained in theater before moving behind the camera, she has developed a style where the intimate blends with the novelistic, and where the gravity of her themes coexists with a playful, musical energy. In her films, she explores love, illness, motherhood, and collective dramas with a formal audacity that favors inventiveness over pure pathos. Her strength lies in tackling painful subjects without ever giving up on storytelling, rhythm, and play, inviting the audience to share both suffering and joy. For Donzelli, cinema is an act of poetic resistance: a way of confronting reality through imagination, combining the weight of hardship with the lightness of play.
A pied d’œuvre portrays the voluntary — and yet dizzying — descent of a man into the margins of society. Bastien Bouillon plays a renowned photographer who, disillusioned with the superficiality of the art world, gives it all up to pursue writing. But his quest for auth...
An unconventional romantic comedy that reveals Donzelli’s passion for the burlesque and the absurd.
An autobiographical chronicle of a couple’s struggle against their child’s illness.
A bold and tragic tale of forbidden love between a brother and a sister, presented in Competition at Cannes.
A bittersweet comedy where architecture and fate’s coincidences upend an ordinary life.
Based on Éric Reinhardt’s novel Love and Forests, an intense story of female resilience.
