Véra Belmont

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Véra Belmont (born November 17, 1932 in Paris ; actually Hélène Gutenberg ) is a French film director , screenwriter and film producer .

Life

Véra Belmont was born in 1932 as the daughter of a carpenter and a worker in Paris and grew up with her younger siblings, the twins Linda and Charles (* 1937), in the Bastille district of Paris. Her Jewish parents, Bronka (née Rotenstein) and Hershel Gutenberg, who emigrated from Poland and Belarus , belonged to the French Communist Party . She herself also joined the party as a teenager. Her schooling was short. At the age of 14 she worked as a seamstress to supplement the family's income. After being expelled from the Communist Youth for supporting a disgraced comrade, Belmont decided to try her hand at acting. Although she took an early interest in cinema, Belmont first played theater in the 1950s. She appeared in The Honorable Whore by Jean-Paul Sartre , among others .

She began her film career as an extra in two French television series, including The Cases of Monsieur Cabrol (1960), and in the drama The Hell of the Virgins (1959). She then turned to the production of films. She produced her first film with the thriller Who Shoots First Has More From Life (1960) by Pierre Montazel . She then founded the production company Stéphan Films, with which she first made José Giovanni's directorial debut Rache ist nicht ein Wort (1967) and then worked with directors such as Marcel Carné and Maurice Pialat . Known for promoting young talent, Belmont also financed André Téchiné's second feature film, Memories from France (1975), in which Jeanne Moreau played the lead role. After a self-made short documentary film about Portugal , the documentary Prisonniers de Mao about the horrors of Chinese prison camps during the Mao dictatorship was the first feature film under Belmont's direction. Two years later she had a great success as co-producer of Jean-Jacques Annaud's award-winning film In the Beginning was the fire (1981).

Belmont made her feature film debut in 1985 with the 1950s drama Red Kisses , in which she dealt with her communist youth and the associated disillusionment and for which she appeared both as a director, as a producer and screenwriter. The film took part in the competition for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival , where Charlotte Valandrey , who starred in the film alongside Lambert Wilson and Marthe Keller , received the Silver Bear for her performance. Belmont's next directorial work was the biopic Geliebte Milena (1991) about the Czech publicist Milena Jesenská . The film was shot in the Bavaria film studios , among others . 1994 saw the production of another award-winning film, Farinelli . With the historical film Marquise - Dangerous Intrigue (1997), Belmont filmed the life story of the Marquise-Thérèse de Gorle , an actress in the time of Molière , who was portrayed in the film by Sophie Marceau . In the same year Belmont was on the jury of the 54th Venice International Film Festival . In 2007, Belmont took on the film adaptation of Misha Defonseca's autobiography . The resulting film, starring Mathilde Goffart, was released in French cinemas in January 2008 under the title Survivre avec les loups . A month later, writer Defonseca admitted that she had made up her life story.

Belmont's marriage to the chanson singer Joël Holmès had a son, Stephan Holmes (1960–1990), who worked as a camera assistant for film. After divorcing Holmès, Belmont married the cameraman Jean-Marie Estève.

Filmography (selection)

production
  • 1960: Whoever shoots first, has more from life ( Ça va être ta fête )
  • 1967: Revenge is not just a word ( La Loi du survivant )
  • 1968: Like young wolves ( Les Jeunes loups )
  • 1968: Naked Childhood ( L'Enfance nue )
  • 1970: A bull sees red ( Un condé )
  • 1970: The Sin of the Abbé Mouret ( La Faute de l'abbé Mouret )
  • 1973: Le Mariage à la mode
  • 1973: Why Israel ( Pourquoi Israël ) (documentary)
  • 1975: The Third Degree ( La Faille )
  • 1975: Memories from France ( Souvenirs d'en France )
  • 1976: In the garden of torment ( Le Jardin des supplices )
  • 1978: La Jument vapeur
  • 1979: Prisonniers de Mao
  • 1979: The Police War ( La Guerre des polices )
  • 1980: Tender cousins ( Tendres cousines )
  • 1981: In the beginning there was fire ( La Guerre du feu )
  • 1982: The Henchmen ( Légitime violence )
  • 1985: diesel
  • 1985: Red Kisses ( Rouge baiser )
  • 1987: Two Half Heroes ( Fucking Fernand )
  • 1987: Life is beautiful ( La Vie est belle )
  • 1991: Beloved Milena ( Milena )
  • 1994: Farinelli
  • 1997: The respite ( La Tregua )
  • 1997: Marquise - Dangerous Intrigue ( Marquise )
  • 2002: Marie Marmaille (TV movie)
  • 2007: Survivre avec les loups
  • 2016: Venise sous la neige
Direction and script
  • 1979: Prisonniers de Mao (documentary)
  • 1985: Red Kisses ( Rouge baiser )
  • 1991: Beloved Milena ( Milena )
  • 1997: Marquise - Dangerous Intrigue ( Marquise )
  • 2007: Survivre avec les loups

Awards

literature

  • Véra Belmont . In: Paule Lejeune: Le Cinéma des femmes: 105 femmes cinéastes d'expression française (France, Belgique, Suisse) 1895−1987 . Editions Atlas, 1987, ISBN 2-7312-0575-X , p. 87.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Véra Belmont, Anne-Marie Philipe: L'hirondelle du faubourg . Stock, 2009, ISBN 978-2-234-06592-5 , pp. 2f.
  2. ↑ a b cf. lesgensducinema.com
  3. ↑ cf. canalplus.fr ( Memento of January 4, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ A b Carrie Tarr, Brigitte Rollet: Cinema and the Second Sex. Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s . Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 30.
  5. ↑ cf. lesgensducinema.com
personal data
SURNAME Belmont, Véra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gutenberg, Hélène (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French film director, screenwriter and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris