Justine Triet: the director who made the decade’s most argued film from the inside

Justine Triet

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 17, 1978 Fécamp, France
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Anatomy of a Fall, In Bed with Victoria, Sibyl
Awards	Palme d'Or · Academy Award · 2 César · BAFTA · Golden Globe

When Anatomy of a Fall opened at Cannes, the festival already knew it was watching something rare: a film written by a couple about the slow dismantling of a couple, which could have been confessional to the point of embarrassment and turned out to be the most coolly intelligent courtroom drama in recent memory. Justine Triet received the Palme d’Or at the ceremony’s close, making her the third female director to win in the festival’s history — a statistic she received with the same composure she had brought to the film itself: not triumph, exactly, but clarity.

Born in Fécamp, a fishing town on the Normandy coast, Triet did not arrive at cinema through the conventional route. She studied painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before being drawn toward video and editing — a path that explains something about her visual intelligence and her discomfort with narrative that declares itself too obviously. The move toward film was gradual, beginning with documentary shorts that placed her inside social friction rather than observing it from a distance.

Her first feature, La Bataille de Solférino, arrived in 2013, its title taken from the Left Bank metro station where the battle between personal crisis and political mobilization plays out simultaneously. A César nomination for Best First Film announced a filmmaker with a distinctive set of preoccupations: the impossible overlap of private life and public event, the comedy and violence of people trying to manage both at once. In Bed with Victoria, which followed in 2016, extended that territory with a comic-legal drama built around Virginie Efira that earned five César nominations, including Best Film. Triet was building a body of work — French critics noticed, international programmers less so.

Sibyl, which competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019, raised the stakes. A film about a therapist who begins transcribing her patient’s confessions as material for a novel, it gathered Virginie Efira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Gaspard Ulliel and allowed them to perform at a pitch of deliberate self-destruction. The premise was high-concept by Triet’s standards; the execution was not. The film did not win the Palme — it did not quite work either, its layers of fiction-within-fiction pulling against each other in ways that felt unresolved. But it established Triet in the international competition landscape and deepened her working relationship with Arthur Harari, her partner, who co-wrote the film with her and had appeared as an actor in her two earlier features.

The critical resistance to Anatomy of a Fall in some quarters — mostly in France, mostly from critics who found the film’s central ambiguity evasive rather than principled — missed what the film was doing. It is not a thriller that withholds information for suspense’s sake. It withholds information because the information does not exist, and the trial at its center is a performance of a marriage as it was experienced from the outside — which is to say, incompletely. Co-written by Triet and Harari about the creative and domestic space they actually share, the film’s refusal to adjudicate whether Sandra (Sandra Hüller, in the performance of the year) killed her husband is not a narrative evasion; it is formal honesty about what intimate knowledge can and cannot provide. Courtroom dramas almost never tell this truth. Anatomy of a Fall tells nothing else.

The film won the Palme d’Or in May 2023, then the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and the César for Best Film. At the Academy Awards the following March, it received five nominations: Best Picture, Best Director for Triet, Best Actress for Hüller, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Screenplay. Triet became the eighth woman ever nominated for Best Director; she and Harari won Best Original Screenplay, the first time a French female screenwriter had taken that prize. At the César ceremony, she became only the second woman to win Best Director in the award’s fifty-year history, after Tonie Marshall in 1976.

Her next film, Fonda, is in production as of 2026 — an English-language thriller with Mia Goth and Andrew Scott in the lead roles, produced again by Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion, with MK2 Films handling international sales. The expansion into Anglophone territory is deliberate; the narrative details remain protected. The restraint, for anyone who has followed Triet’s career, is itself characteristic.

Triet and Harari have two daughters and continue to live and work in Paris. Their collaboration — which began on Sibyl and deepened substantially for Anatomy of a Fall, written during the pandemic in the gaps between meals and childcare — is unusually legible in the films themselves. Harari has noted the process took longer than Triet’s earlier work and felt more demanding. The result, it turned out, was the most internationally successful French film in years.