Robert Guédiguian

French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian wrote, directed and produced a sizable and acclaimed body of work that explored issues of the working class and immigrant experience in his native country and abroad that included "Marius and Jeannette" (1997), "The Town is Quiet" (2000), "The Last Mitterrand" (2005) and "Don't Tell Me the Boy Is Mad" (2015). Born Robert Juels Guédiguian in Marseilles, France on December 3, 1953, he was the son of working-class parents from German and Armenian backgrounds. He studied sociology at the University of Provence, where he met his future wife and collaborator, actress/writer Ariane Ascaride. While writing a thesis on the working class at the Conservatory of Paris, he was approached by filmmaker René Féret to pen a film version of the epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. The project did not come to fruition, but the two would work together on Féret's comedy "Fernand" in 1980. The following year, Guédiguian would make his directorial debut with the film "Last Summer," starring Ascaride and Gérard Meylan, who would also appear in many of his features. His cinematic body of work expanded greatly in the years that followed, with films including "Rouge midi" (1985), "Roundabout" (1989) with Juliette Binoche and "Till Death Do Us Part" (1995). Guedigian's hometown of Marseilles was frequently the focus of these efforts, while his parents' ethnic backgrounds also informed many of his stories, like "Rouge midi," which concerned Italian immigrants in France. One of his most successful explorations of these characters came with "Marius and Jeannette" (1997), a romantic comedy-drama about two working-class apartment dwellers (Meylan and Ascaride) in Marseilles who must overcome financial and emotional burdens in order to fall in love. The film earned Ascaride a César for Best Actress and Best Director and Best Film for Guédiguian. He would revisit his recurring themes and locale through a variety of genres in the years that followed, from the noir-driven "The Town is Quiet" (2000) to the Palme d'Or-nominated melodrama "Marie-Jo and Her Two Lovers" (2002) and the fantasy-tinged "My Father is an Engineer" (2004), with Ascaride and Meylan trying to rouse a woman from a catatonic depression. In 2005, he earned a Golden Bear nomination from the Berlin International Film Festival for "The Last Mitterrand," with Michel Bouquet in a César-winning turn as an elderly French president (modeled after real-life president Francois Mitterrand) recalling his life for a biographer. The following year found Guédiguian exploring his own past with "Armenia" (2006), a drama about a terminally ill man who leaves a trail for his daughter that leads back to the titular country, his homeland. He scored subsequent hits with the crime drama "Lady Jane" (2008) and "The Army of Crime" (2009) about real-life French Resistance leader Missak Manouchian before writing and directing "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (2011), a drama about a union leader who learns to take pity on the children of a former worker who have committed a crime against him in order to survive. The picture was nominated for the Certain Regard Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and was soon followed by a slew of genre experiments, including "Ariane's Thread" (2014), a fantasy with Ascaride and Meylan as wayward souls seeking fulfillment in a seaside town, and the drama "Don't Tell Me the Boy Was Mad" (2015), a drama based on the life of journalist Jose Antonio Gurriarán, who was injured during a bomb attack by members of an Armenian liberation group in 1981.