Sébastien Lifshitz

Sébastien Lifshitz is a French director and screenwriter born in Paris in 1968. After studying art history at the École du Louvre, he began working in the contemporary art world in 1990, as an assistant to curator Bernard Blistène at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and to visual artist and photographer Suzanne Lafont. In 1994, he turned to filmmaking and directed his first short film, Il faut que je l’aime. In 2012, he directed Les invisibles, which was presented in the Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival. The film went on to win the César Award for Best Documentary Film. Lifshitz continued his documentary work exploring gender and feminism with Bambi (2013) and Les vies de Thérèse (2017), which was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the 69th Cannes Film Festival. He then spent five years filming Adolescentes (2019), which received an award at the Locarno Film Festival, won the Louis-Delluc Prize, and received three César Awards. He went on to direct Petite Fille, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. This was followed by Casa Susanna (2022), an American documentary selected for the Venice Film Festival, Madame Hofmann (2023), and Un jeune homme de bonne famille (2026).