Céline Sciamma

Known for

Directing

Born

November 12, 1978

Birthplace

Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France

Céline Sciamma is a French screenwriter and film director. Sciamma's work is strikingly minimalist. She is known for her transformational work with themes of gender fluidity, sexual identity among girls and women, and the female gaze. Sciamma studied screenwriting at La Fémis, France’s prestigious national film school. Her graduation screenplay became Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres, 2007), a quietly assured debut that premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. Set against the world of synchronised swimming in suburban Paris, it established many of the themes that would come to define her work: adolescence, female friendship and the uncertainty of first love. She further explored such themes in Tomboy (2011), a sensitive portrait of childhood gender identity, before Girlhood (Bande de filles, 2014) shifted the focus to the lives of black teenage girls growing up in the suburbs of Paris. She considers her first three feature films to constitute a coming-of-age trilogy. Her 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, won her the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The film was an international critical success, praised for its restrained storytelling, luminous cinematography and original exploration of the female gaze. It was also named the 30th greatest film of all time in the Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll. The poll also featured her latest feature, Petite Maman (2021), a film about childhood, grief and memory. Sciamma also wrote the screenplays for the Oscar-nominated animated feature My Life as a Courgette (2016) and the André Téchiné film Being 17 (2016). She is also an activist and a founding member of the 50/50 collective, an advocacy association that promotes gender parity, diversity, and inclusion in the film and audiovisual industry. Her latest works are the documentary short films This Is How a Child Becomes a Poet (2023), a tribute to the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, and Tutti Frutti (2025) — an intimate visual diary shot over four years — made as part of a collection for the Paris Centre Pompidou.