Danielle Arbid

Born in Lebanon in 1970, Danielle Arbid has been directing films since 1997. Her work has been selected for numerous festivals in France and around the world, including Cannes, New York, San Francisco, Locarno, Pusan, and Tokyo. Arbid’s first two feature films, Dans les champs de bataille and Un homme perdu, were screened at the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Festival in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and were shown at around thirty other festivals, earning numerous awards, including the Directors' Fortnight Prize and the Milan Grand Prize.

Interested in different narrative forms, her work alternates between fiction, first-person documentaries, and video essays, experimenting with the intersection of genres. Her documentaries and other filmed essays have received critical acclaim and won dozens of awards, including the Gold Leopard for Conversations de salon at the Locarno Festival and the Silver Leopard for video for Seule avec la guerre in 2001 and 2004, respectively, as well as the Prix Albert Londres and the Villa Medici Hors les Murs Award for Aux Frontières. Four retrospectives of Arbid’s films were held at the Bastia Festival in 2007, Paris Cinéma in 2007, the Gijón Festival in 2007, and the La Rochelle Festival in 2008.

Her third fiction feature, Peur de rien (Parisienne), was released theatrically in France on February 10, 2016. The film won the Académie Lumière Foreign Press Prize and other awards, including Best Actress at Les Arcs, and received rave reviews from the French press. Peur de rien had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.