User:Elare321/Abdellatif Kechiche

Abdellatif Kechiche born on December 7th 1960, in Tunis, Tunisia,  is a Tunisian- French director, screenplay writer and actor. Known for his naturalistic style, he has been awarded several times at the César du cinéma and won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes film festival for his film Blue Is the Warmest Color.

Early life
Born in Tunisia, Abdellatif Kechiche emigrated with his parents to Nice, France when he was six years old. Passionate about theater, he took drama classes at the Antibes Conservatory. He performed several shows on the Cote d’Azur, most notably a play by Federico Garcia Lorca in 1978 and a play by Eduardo Manet the following year. He was equally as dedicated to directing as he was to performing in theater, he presented The Architect at the Avignon Festival in 1981.

In film, his first acting role was in Abdelkrim Bahioul’s Mint Tea, where he played a young Algerian immigrant who moved to Paris to make his fortune.

André Téchiné hired him in 1987 in The Innocents where he played a gigolo with Sandrine Bonnaire and Jean-Claude Brialy. Thanks to Nouri Bouzid’s film Bezness, he won the best male actor award at the Namur Festival in 1992.

That same year he met his companion, Ghalya Lacroix, with whom he would collaborate with in writing and editing his future projects.

Career as a director
In 2003, he wrote and directed Games of Love and Chance (L’Esquive) with amateur actors and an extremely limited budget. The film follows a group of high school students from the Parisian suburbs who rehearse a Marivaux play for their French class. The film was an honorable success for an author’s film without known actors; it was hailed by critics as one of the biggest French films of the year 2004. He won four awards at the, 30th César awards in 2005:Best film, best director, and best screenplay. Sara Forestier a lead actress won the Cesar for most promising actress for her role in Games of Love and Chance.

He then directed the Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le mulet) in 2006, which evokes the journey of a worker of Maghrebian origin who wants to establish a restaurant in the port of Sete as an inheritance for his family, but meets French bureaucratic opposition.