Francois Ozon

In just over a decade, Francois Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Femis, Ozon has made a number of critically acclaimed shorts and eleven feature films, including international successes 8 femmes and Swimming Pool and more recent releases such as Angel, Ricky and Le refuge. Despite tremendous diversity in cinematic choices, Ozon's oeuvre is surprisingly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. Thibaut Schilt provides an overview of Francois Ozon's career to date, contextualizing Ozon's filmmaking within the larger fields of French filmmaking and international queer cinema. Schilt discusses several major themes running through Ozon's work, including obsessions with inadequate fathers, various types of mourning, and a recurring taste for "the foreign." The volume also includes an insightful interview with the director. Thibaut Schilt is an assistant professor of French in the department of modern languages and literatures at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.