Francois Ozon
Born: November 15 1967
Where: Paris , France
Dubbed the Pedro Almodovar of French cinema, Ozon is able to switch effortlessly from the light farce of 8 Women to the darker sided Swimming Pool.
Born into a family of teachers, he was fascinated by the camera (his favourite directors are Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk) from an early age and also had a fascination for trashy American TV shows.
Age 18 he entered the French national film school, Femis, where he made short films including the bloodcurdling featurette See The Sea, which drew comparisons with Polanski and Hitchcock.
Released in 1998, his satire Sitcom - where a family lose their sexual inhibitions with the arrival of a white rat - made Ozon a sensation among French youth.
This was followed by Criminal Lovers, an ultra-violent, true-crime fairytale, and the S&M-themed Water Drops on Burning Rocks (based on a Fassbinder play).
Ozon then switched styles to craft Under the Sand, a movie about a middle-aged woman (Charlotte Rampling), whose husband disappears.
Confounding his fans, he then made the accomplished country house murder mystery 8 Women with a wealth of female French acting talent from Ludivine Sagnier to Catherine Deneuve.
The movie was such a hit French Prime Minster Lionel Jospin and German premier Gerhard Schröder even hosted celebration parties for the cast.
In 2003, he made the dark drama Swimming Pool, again starring Rampling and Sagnier, about a crime writer holidaying on the French Riviera.
Recent work includes the romantic drama 5x2, starring Valeria Bruno-Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss.
