Claire Denis

Claire Denis's cinema goes by way of the body: she draws no line between physical sensation and the working of the mind, so that disgust and desire, longing and trauma all operate at once. She grew up in colonial French Africa herself. Her first film, Chocolat, is built on the memories of a white French woman returning to the house of her childhood in Cameroon, and there is power as well as attraction in her relationship with the family's Cameroonian servant. Colonialism and French identity never left the work after that film. In Beau Travail a solitary man living in Paris recalls the days he spent in Djibouti with the Foreign Legion, guilt and unanswered desire keeping after him. Agnes Godard, with whom she has often worked, shot its images.