Marin Karmitz

Origins and early life

Marin Karmitz was born in Bucharest on 7 October 1938 into a Romanian Jewish family, and he bears the name of his grandfather Marin Karmitz, who ran a dairy business in the city; the family left for France in 1948, after the war that had destroyed much of Romanian Jewry and under a regime that was closing in on what remained of its bourgeoisie. He studied at the French national film school and worked as a cameraman before directing his own films in the late 1960s, among them Camarades and Coup pour coup, made with factory workers rather than actors and banned from French television.

Work and career

He then turned to the harder and more durable trade: distribution and exhibition. He founded MK2, opened his first cinema in a working-class quarter of eastern Paris in 1974, and built from it a company that produces, distributes and screens, an integrated model almost no one else in Europe sustained. As a producer he backed Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle, Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke and Krzysztof Kieslowski, for whom he produced the Three Colours trilogy.

He has said that his life's work was to defend a cinema that argues with its audience rather than flatters it. He handed MK2 to his sons Nathanael and Elisha in 2005, and has since published memoirs and built a major art collection.