Directed by Claire Denis

No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outsider’s perspective. Atmospheric, elliptical, and hypnotically absorbing, her films unfold as sensuous washes of sound and image that manage to balance intimate human stories with weighty themes of postcolonial tension, modern alienation, and the boundless complexities of love and sex. This selection of some of Denis’s key works—including her simmering erotic masterpiece BEAU TRAVAIL—reveals a wholly original artist who is as much a storyteller as she is a poet of rhythm, movement, and mood.