Claire Denis

Known for: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Shots of Rum (2008)

Claire Denis grew up in French colonial Africa and has returned repeatedly to questions of the body, memory, and colonial history in films of extreme sensory attention. Beau Travail (1999) — a film of French Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti, built around a Denis Lavant performance and fragments of Britten's Billy Budd — is among the most formally beautiful films of its decade. She works in close creative collaboration with the cinematographer Agnès Godard and the composer Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks.