Diane Kurys

Origins and early life

Diane Kurys was born in Lyon in 1948 into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the daughter of immigrants from central Europe who had survived the war in France, and her parents separated when she was six; that separation, and the world her parents came from, became the material of almost everything she filmed.

Work and career

She acted on stage and in film through the 1970s, including for Jean-Luc Godard, before writing and directing Diabolo menthe in 1977, an autobiographical film about two sisters and their mother in a single-parent household in the Paris of 1963, told entirely from the daughters' side. It was a considerable success and won the Prix Louis-Delluc, and it opened French cinema to a kind of women's autobiography that had barely existed in it.

She then went back further into the same family: Coup de foudre in 1983 tells how her parents met, opening in a camp in the Pyrenees where a Jewish woman is interned and marries a soldier who can get her out, and then follows the friendship between two women that ends her mother's marriage. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film. She continued the cycle with La Baule-les-Pins in 1990 and Pour une femme in 2013, and also made Un homme amoureux, Les Enfants du siècle and Sagan. Her work is one long attempt to understand her parents by filming them.