French art-house cinema star, Isabelle Huppert will be in Ghent on October 18th to present her latest film at the Ghent Film Festival. Huppert stars in Mon Pire Cauchemar alongside Belgian national treasure, Benoît Poelvoorde (C’est Arrivé Près de chez Vous, Rien à Déclarer). The director is Anne Fontaine, who previously wrote and directeCoco Avant Chanel as well as writing the script for Atom Egoyan’s thriller, Chloe. Huppert has played in over ninety films since the start of her acting career in the early seventies. Her absolute top year was 2000, during which she acted in no fewer than six different movies. Fourteen films with Huppert have been selected for the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival. She is also the only actress to have been nominated thirteen times for a César (French film award) for Best Actress and actually took home the award once. She was voted Best Actress twice at both the Venice Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival.

Huppert is widely credited for her courageous choices interpreting roles that are often of a neurotic, cold or violent nature. Nevertheless this has not prevented her from becoming one of the most in-demand French actresses of the last four decades.

She debuted in 1972 in Faustine et le Bel Été, but her international breakthrough came only in 1977 with Claude Goretta’s film La Dentellière. She repeated her exceptional acting performance in 1978 in Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière, for which she won the award for Best Actress in Cannes, and was suddenly showered with roles. In the years following that, Huppert continued to work hard, adding several nominations and awards to her name. Although she still likes the challenge of working with young and up-and-coming filmmakers, she has always had a penchant for director Claude Chabrol, collaborating with him on Une Affaire de Femmes (1988) for which she was voted Best Actress in Venice, Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995), for which she was awarded a César and was once again voted Best Actress in Venice, Rien Ne Va Plus (1997), Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000) and L’ivresse du Pouvoir (2006). 2001 marked another triumph in her career when she received the award for Best Actress for the second time at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste.

One of Huppert’s most interesting roles is that of the neurotic Augustine in François Ozon’s remake of 8 Femmes. The film was nominated for twelve Césars and six European Film Awards. The European Film Award for Best Actress went to the entire female cast (including Cathérine Deneuve and Emanuelle Béart), a feat which they repeated at the Berlin Film Festival.

In Mon Pire Cauchemar, a romantic comedy with a sharp edge, Huppert plays Agathe, who lives with her son and husband in a beautiful apartment on the edge of the city park. Patrick (Poelvoorde) lives in a van with his son. She is the director of a prestigious contemporary art foundation, while he does odd jobs which are paid for under the table and lives off benefits. She spent seven years at university. He spent seven years in prison. She likes in-depth discussions, while he prefers plunging cleavages. Nevertheless they meet because their children get on like a house on fire. Agathe and Patrick soon understand why.

The film is distributed by Alternative Films and will be in cinemas throughout Belgium from November 9th.

Mon Pire Cauchemar in the presence of Isabelle Huppert on 18/10 at 20.30, at Kinepolis.
Tickets go on sale from 29/09 at www.filmfestival.be.

The complete programme of the 38th Ghent Film Festival (from October 11th until October 22nd) will be published on September 28th.