Bruno Dumont

Northern France, filmed plainly and cast mostly with local non-professionals. Dumont began with bleak rural dramas like Humanité, where a grieving police superintendent near Lille investigates the murder of an eleven-year-old girl. By Slack Bay he was making slapstick on the same coast with the same kind of untrained faces. He has filmed Joan of Arc twice, and in The Empire he sets a war between extraterrestrials in a fishing village on the Opal Coast.

Signature

• Non-professional actors from the Nord and Pas-de-Calais.
• Faith and brutality side by side (Hadewijch, Outside Satan).
• Joan of Arc as a heavy-metal musical in Jeannette, then at war in Joan of Arc.
• Deadpan comedy on the Opal Coast (Slack Bay, The Empire).