Biography
A leading figure in the New French Extremity movement, director and screenwriter Bruno Dumont became a festival favorite with a series of provocative arthouse films deliberately intended to stir audiences' emotions. Born in the small French town of Bailleul in 1958, Dumont began his career as a philosophy professor, and later began to moonlight as a film-maker with a number of industrial documentaries and short films including "Paris" (1993), "P'tit Quinquin" (1993) and "Marie et Freddy" (1994). Inspired by the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dumont eventually gave up his day job and moved into feature-length cinema with "La vie de Jesus," an unsettling study of disenchanted youth which showcased his penchant for extreme violence and graphic sexuality, use of non-professional actors and gritty realism. A contemplative tale in which a detached detective investigates the murder of an 11-year-old girl, follow-up "Humanite" (1999) launched Dumont into the spotlight, winning three awards at the Cannes Film Festival including the Grand Prix. Dumont further established his reputation as one of French cinema's most divisive names with "Twentynine Palms" (2003), a hugely disturbing road movie in which a photographer and his Russian girlfriend's trip to the Southern California desert ends in horrific circumstances. Dumont then won his second Cannes Grand Prix with "Flandres" (2006), a powerful meditation on both everyday life and the horrors of war, and three years later addressed themes of religious obsession, teenage desire and racial tension in "Hadewijch" (2009), the story of a troubled young Sister whose blind faith is severely tested by her relationship with two Muslim brothers. The visually stunning "Hors Satan" (2011) saw Dumont once again explore the nature of good and evil with a typically avant-garde take on the serial killer film, while "Camille Claudel 1915" (2013) found him working with French film royalty in the shape of Juliette Binoche for a surprisingly compassionate biopic of the tortured sculptor. In 2014, Dumont unexpectedly ventured into television with "P'tit Quinquin" (Arte France, 2014), a bizarre blend of screwball comedy and police procedural in which a small town falls victim to a band of young scoundrels.
