Light up the Void  

Lucile Hadžihalilović is a French director, screenwriter, editor, and producer. She studied at ESEC, then at IDHEC (now La Fémis), where she directed her graduation film, La Première Mort de Nono, in 1986. In 1991, she co-founded the film production company Les Cinémas de la zone with Gaspar Noé and produced and edited Carne (1991) and I Stand Alone (1998). She has since pursued a career as a producer, but also as a screenwriter and director.



She is a member of the 50/50 collective, which aims to promote gender equality and diversity in film and television. Lucile Hadžihalilović's cinematic universe is based on sensation and emotion. Sensory experience, surreal reverie, and philosophical reflection define her world. For her, mystery is not frightening; it is beautiful, inspiring, and fascinating. It helps us move forward, surpass ourselves, and survive.

In the sometimes predictable landscape of French cinema, Lucile Hadzihalilovic stands out and fascinates. A discreet but essential director, she has been building a sensory and hypnotic body of work for over two decades, on the border of fantasy and fairy tale, where childhood is often a territory of metamorphosis - sometimes sweet, often disturbing.

Often described as a "poet of the strange", Lucile Hadžihalilović continues, film after film, to explore the margins, the limbo, and the metamorphoses of innocence...

In 1995, filmmaker Gérard Courant shot a Cinématon featuring Lucile Hadzihalilovic, at a time when she was still largely unknown to the wider public but already embedded in the margins of French auteur cinema. The short film—3 minutes and 25 seconds long, silent and shot in a fixed frame—forms part of Courant’s monumental project Cinématon, begun in 1978 and still ongoing: a vast collection of filmed portraits capturing artists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural figures through an austere, unchanging dispositif.

The premise is deceptively simple. The camera remains static, no sound is recorded, and the subject is free to do whatever they wish within the allotted time. Yet this radical minimalism turns the Cinématon into a revealing ordeal. Deprived of narrative, dialogue, and direction, the filmed subject must confront their own presence—body, gaze, gestures—before the lens. In the case of Lucile Hadzihalilovic, this confrontation acquires a particular resonance.

In 1995, Lucile Hadzihalilovic stood at a transitional moment. She had worked as an editor and collaborator—most notably with Gaspar Noé—but had not yet directed Mimi (1996), the film that would mark her emergence as a distinctive voice. Courant’s camera captures her before recognition, suspended between anonymity and authorship. Viewed today, the portrait takes on a strong retrospective value, almost documentary in nature.

True to his method, Courant neither directs nor interprets. He records. Meaning is left to emerge—or not—through duration and attention. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s restrained physicality, her inward gaze, the controlled stillness of her presence seem, in hindsight, uncannily aligned with the aesthetic that would later define her films. Themes central to her work—silence, corporeality, isolation, and temporal suspension—are already perceptible, not as statements but as sensibilities. (Innocence, Évolution, Earwig)



This Cinématon functions less as a psychological portrait than as a sensitive archive. It resists definitive interpretation, offering instead a raw fragment of time. Like the broader Cinématon project, it contributes to an alternative cinematic memory: not a history made of film clips and achievements, but one composed of faces, durations, and silent encounters.

Nearly thirty years later, Gérard Courant’s portrait of Lucile Hadzihalilovic stands as a modest yet invaluable document—a fleeting record of a filmmaker on the verge of defining her voice. In the imposed silence of the frame, something already announces itself, quietly, for those willing to look closely and wait.