Éric Toledano

Origins and early life

Éric Toledano was born in Paris on 3 July 1971 to Moroccan Jewish parents: his father, a graduate of the French national school of administration, began his career in the Moroccan civil service before moving to Paris to work at the French centre for foreign trade, and his mother was a secretary.

Work and career

Like his co-director he came to cinema through the Jewish youth movement Yaniv rather than through film school, and it was at a gathering of Yaniv camp counsellors at Le Chesnay in 1995 that he met Olivier Nakache; the two have written and directed together ever since, and they have never made a film apart. Their comedies work by putting people from incompatible worlds in the same enclosed space and letting the friction produce both the jokes and the argument: a summer camp, a wedding, a specialised care association, a hospital ward.

Intouchables, released in 2011 and based on the true story of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and Abdel Sellou, took more than nineteen million admissions in France and became one of the most successful French films ever released internationally. Hors normes, about two men who care for autistic adults the state has given up on, closed the Cannes festival in 2019. Toledano served as vice-president of the César Academy from 2020 to 2022 and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2020.