Anne Fontaine Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Anne Fontaine
Directing
Biography
Anne Fontaine (born in Luxembourg, 1959) is a filmmaker and screenwriter who used to be an actor. She lives and works in France. Born Fontaine Sibertin-Blanc, sister of actor Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc, she went as a young child to live in Lisbon, where her father, Antoine Sibertin-Blanc, is a music professor and cathedral organist. In adolescence she moved to Paris and trained in dance with Joseph Russillo while continuing her academic education, including philosophy. Her husband is Philippe Carcassonne, the film producer, and they have an adopted son who was born in Vietnam. While still dancing, she was picked by Robert Hossein to play Esmeralda in a 1980 theatrical production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and around this time started to use the name Anne Fontaine. She continued with acting and became known for her roles in comedies like Si ma gueule vous plaît... (1981) and P.R.O.F.S.(1985). An opportunity to be assistant director came with a 1986 stage version of Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) at the Renaud-Barrault theatre. Fontaine's first project as solo director, Les histoires d'amour finissent mal... en général (Love Affairs Usually End Badly), won the 1993 Prix Jean Vigo (prize). In 1995, she worked with her brother on the comic Augustin. Two years later, she wrote and directed the successful Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning). This won the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival 1997 and is generally considered a milestone on Fontaine's way to becoming "an important figure in contemporary French cinema". In 1999 the character Augustin (Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc) re-appeared in Fontaine's film Augustin, Roi Du Kung-Fu (Augustin, King of Kung-Fu). Comment j'ai tué mon père (How I Killed My Father) was released in 2001, and Nathalie... followed in 2003. The 2005 film, Entre Ses Mains (In His Hands) has been widely described as a thriller: an "intimate thriller" according to Fontaine herself. A third Augustin film, Nouvelle chance (also known as Oh La La) was released in 2006. Then came La fille de Monaco (The Girl From Monaco) in 2008 and Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel), her biopic of Coco Chanel, in 2009. Fontaine's work is not easily categorised, though the phrase "psychological drama" is often used. She told a UK newspaper, "I try to work on my characters' blind side, in a kind of Freudian way: to ask, 'What are the things about themselves that they're unaware of?' I'm fascinated by the irony of fate, when something goes into a skid. All my stories have an element of cruelty in them." Description above from the Wikipedia article Anne Fontaine (filmmaker), licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Tender Cousins
Teenage Julien loves his teenage cousin Julia among flowers in summer of '39 France.
Keep It Quiet
A businessman convicted of a white-collar crime becomes a changed person upon his release from prison.
The Last Romantic Lover
The romance between a lion tamer and a liberated girl.
P.R.O.F.S.
A clique of four young teachers at a high school looks critically at their colleagues. To avoid falling in the same routine, they bring new ideas into the school lessons and play little games and pranks in their spare time -- sometimes get even more childish than their pupils. When they get opposition from the other teachers, they play tricks to get rid of them.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
The epic life story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), a French screenwriter, director and producer, true pioneer of cinema, the first person who made a narrative fiction film; author of hundreds of movies, but banished from history books. Ignored and forgotten. At last remembered.
A Day in the Life of French Cinema
Documentary showing one day of work of over 90 actors and filmmakers from French cinema on the same day. On 27 March 2002, 27 teams filmed actors, directors, producers and technicians at work, from Hawaii to Paris and from New York to Lisbon.
Si ma gueule vous plaît...
A French satirical comedy that examines society’s obsession with appearance. A man with unconventional looks unexpectedly becomes a public sensation, facing ridicule and admiration. His striking features thrust him into a whirlwind of media sensationalism and superficial relationships. Amid a series of ironic and humorous encounters, he grapples with the burden of being judged solely on his appearance, ultimately questioning the true essence of beauty and personal worth.
Conversation avec Anne Fontaine
Comedies, biopics, historical tragedies, social dramas, cleverly twisted tales... Anne Fontaine has explored them all. With a keen focus on always delivering popular cinema, the director paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Western human soul in its most beautiful and fascinating missteps. She revisits her films in an interview.
Production
Coco Before Chanel
Several years after leaving the orphanage, to which her father never returned for her, Gabrielle Chanel finds herself working in a provincial bar. She's both a seamstress for the performers and a singer, earning the nickname Coco from the song she sings nightly with her sister. A liaison with Baron Balsan gives her an entree into French society and a chance to develop her gift for designing.
Coco Before Chanel
Several years after leaving the orphanage, to which her father never returned for her, Gabrielle Chanel finds herself working in a provincial bar. She's both a seamstress for the performers and a singer, earning the nickname Coco from the song she sings nightly with her sister. A liaison with Baron Balsan gives her an entree into French society and a chance to develop her gift for designing.
Dry Cleaning
A bored couple takes in a young man who turns their lives inside out.
Dry Cleaning
A bored couple takes in a young man who turns their lives inside out.
How I Killed My Father
When his long-time disappeared father is entering his life again, Jean-Luc, a successful doctor, has no option but to face his own life story. Will he ever be able to forget and forgive?
Augustin
Augustin Dos Santos is a benign simpleton with a slight stammer. He's serious about his part-time job as a clerk for an insurance company, and he also acts, with small parts under his belt in commercials and experimental films. An agent finds his serious innocence perfect for a part as an odd bellman. Before his screen test, he volunteers for a day at a hotel. At his screen test, his inability to see the comic center of the scene makes him perfect for the part. Back at work, women co-workers tease him, and then he's off to the countryside to play a vet in a government film about myxomatosis in rabbits. Can anything break through his serious view of reality?
In His Hands
In Lille, Claire Gauthier is an ordinary married woman with a young daughter that works in an insurance company analyzing losses of insured properties. When the single veterinary Laurent Kessler claims damage in his basement caused by a flooding due to water leakage, Claire resolves the situation favorably for him. The weird Laurent visits Claire in her office successively, inviting her for drinks and lunch, and they get close to each other. Meanwhile, a serial killer is terrorizing Lille, killing women with a scalpel. Claire feels a great attraction for Laurent, who has an unusual behavior in her apartment. When Claire sees a scalpel in the pocket of Laurent's jacket, she fears him, but still loves him.
The Girl from Monaco
A brilliant and neurotic attorney goes to Monaco to defend a famous criminal. But, instead of focusing on the case, he falls for a beautiful she-devil, who turns him into a complete wreck... Hopefully, his zealous bodyguard will step in and put everything back in order... Or will he ?
Augustin, King of Kung-Fu
The solitary and largely self-contained Augustin (Jean-Chretien Sibertin Blanc), on obscure young actor of bit-parts and advertisements, has but one ambition - to play the lead role in a Kung Fu epic. But hours of Kung Fu practice alone in his room are not enough. Augustin knows he must pack up and start a new life in China... or at least that part of China within bicycling distance: Chinatown in south-east Paris. There he meets Ling (Maggie Cheung), a young Chinese woman who practices ocupuncture, and little by little, Ling's needles awaken emotions in Augustin that his virginal body had never dreamed of. Where will this lead him? To Kung Fu stardom, maybe not, but to another destiny, a quirky but logical continuation of the same dream.
Nathalie...
Paris doctor Catherine starts to think her husband, Bernard, is having an affair when she hears an unfamiliar woman's message on his voice mail. Hoping to learn more about his extramarital activities, Catherine heads to a strip club, where she hires call girl Nathalie to have a fling with Gerard. As the affair progresses, Nathalie gives Catherine regular status reports, and the relationship between the women evolves from business to personal.
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