Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire arrived at Cannes in 2019 and left as one of the most-discussed films of the festival, winning the Best Screenplay prize and the Queer Palm. It went on to take Best Film and Best Director at the César Awards in 2020, and is now routinely cited among the defining European films of the past decade. The Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll placed it at number thirty on its Greatest Films of All Time list, an extraordinary placing for a film only three years old at the time of voting.

The film was shot on the Brittany coast in late 2018 with Claire Mathon as cinematographer; her photography of candlelit interiors and grey-blue sea won the Lumière and the European Film Award for Best Cinematographer. Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant play the leads, with Luàna Bajrami and Valeria Golino in support. The score is unusually sparse, most of the film plays without music, with two bursts of choral work composed by Para One and Arthur Simonini that have entered the repertoire of contemporary cinema soundtracks.

Sciamma wrote the screenplay during the production of Girlhood and developed it for several years; her commitment to the project meant the film took longer to reach the screen than her usual two-year cadence. She has described it as the culmination of her interest in the female gaze, a phrase the film made unexpectedly central to mainstream film criticism for the better part of a year.