French Director Christophe Honore to be honored at Oldenburg Film Fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - Christophe Honore, the French director of Ma Mere, Love Songs and Dans Paris, and a filmmaker who never saw a taboo he wouldn't break, will be honored at this year's Oldenburg Film Festival with a retrospective of his life's work, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

Oldenburg will screen six films from Honore's body of work, including his 2002 debut Seventeen Times Cecile Cassard, starring Beatrice Dalle and Romain Duris: The drama, which explores a woman's life through 17 separate moments from her life, premiered in Cannes before heading to Oldenburg.

“It's nice to see one of our 'discoveries' has gone on to become a truly great voice in French cinema,” Oldenburg Festival Director Torsten Neumann tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We're honored to be able to welcome him back this year.”

Honore confirmed his reputation as a talent to watch with Ma Mere in 2004. The touching, but also disturbing films stars Isabelle Huppert as a promiscuous and amoral mother who, after her husband dies, begins to introduce their son into a world of hedonism. It was Honore's first collaboration with Louis Garrel, who plays the young son. The pair would go on to make five films together, including 2007's Love Songs, a modern day musical which premiered in competition in Cannes. The film had Honore's trademark pansexuality but surprised many critics by its light and tender touch. It went onto win three Cesar Awards.

Thoughts that Honore might be going soft, however, were dispelled by his 2010 drama Man at Bath, a highly-erotic gay love story featuring ample (some critics said excessive) full frontal nudity and plenty of full-on sex and starring homosexual porn star Francois Saget.

Honore returned to the musical genre with Beloved, which stared Catherine Deneuve, Ludivine Sagnier and Chiara Mastroianni as three generations of Parisians falling in and out of love. But his taste for experimentation hasn't left him. In 2014 Honore explored the fantasy genre with Metamorphose, a drama loosely based on Ovid's epic; and this year he tried his hand at kids comedy with Sophie's Misfortunes, an adaptation of classic French children's novels from La Comtesse de Segur.

Christophe Honore will attend Oldenburg to present his works from Sept 15-17. The Oldenburg Film Festival runs Sept. 14-18.