Noémie Lvovsky

Origins and early life

Noémie Lvovsky was born in the eighth arrondissement of Paris on 14 December 1964; her father is Jewish, and her paternal grandparents had come to France from what is now Ukraine to escape the pogroms.

Work and career

His entire family was deported and murdered, leaving, as she has put it, no graves, no photographs and no objects, only names. She has said plainly that she was given no religious education and does not know the traditions, and that when she asked about it as a child her father said nothing while her mother told her that to Jews she was not Jewish, but to antisemites she was; the family history nonetheless runs through her work, most directly in Faut que ça danse!

in 2007, whose central figure is an ageing Jewish father who survived. Trained at the IDHEC film school, she wrote for Arnaud Desplechin and Claude Sautet before directing La vie ne me fait pas peur in 1999, and won the Prix Louis-Delluc for Les Sentiments in 2003. Camille redouble, in which she plays a woman of forty sent back into her own adolescence, drew thirteen César nominations in 2012 and was one of the French successes of the decade.

She is also a prolific actress, in Les Beaux Gosses, La Belle Saison and dozens of other films, and was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2019.