Biography

Catherine Corsini was born on May 18, 1956 in Dreux, Eure-et-Loir, France. She is a director and writer, known for The Divide (2021), Summertime (2015) and Three Worlds (2012).

Member of the jury at the Brest European Short Film Festival, in 2003

Has supported Ségolène Royal's 2007 presidential campaign.

She studied for 3 years at the CNSAD (National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts). Her acting teachers include Michel Bouquet and Antoine Vitez.

[press conference for The Divide (2021) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival] I was looking for a topic that would talk about my own questions about society which I view as increasingly harsh and effectively fractured. I wanted to talk about the world today - my position. When I was 18 years old, I was very engaged, I was quite an activist, I thought the world would become better, there would be more solidarity - I was a young girl full of dreams - and I thought to myself today, "What kind of horrible, dreadful world are we leaving to the up-and-coming generation and our children?!" I felt it was necessary to talk about this world and the way I view it. The way I view the world is that of someone who's a very privileged person and I wanted to talk about the world in a very straight way. But at the same time I wanted things to be fairly humorous, I didn't want to produce a really heavy film saying, "this is right, this is not good"......thanks to the characters, you can see that everyone comes together.

[press conference for Homecoming (2023) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival] I began to write the film with my co-screenwriter who's not here unfortunately - because she's also a DJ - Naïla Guiguet, a young screenwriter who's just graduated from La Fémis. I wanted to talk about young people so I thought maybe I was too old to do this and I needed some fresh blood, someone younger. I was asking myself all sorts of questions. Elisabeth [Elisabeth Perez], who's my producer and also the person I live with, has a son who's 20 years old now - I saw him grow up - and I was very keen to listen to how this young man had questions to ask about society, so I thought I would like to talk about youth in another film. I felt it was an unknown world for me because a lot of things had happened since my generation grew up. I also deeply wanted to film Corsica and to film in Corsica because for me it's a missing part. My father was Corsican; I wasn't raised in Corsica because my mother practically removed me from the island. I went there in the summer but things were too painful, there were too many memories.

[Cannes press conference for Homecoming (2023)] I would perhaps ask myself more questions. If we had intimacy coaches to work with the actresses to make them feel more comfortable in their bodies.....we did a lot of preparation for the scenes in any event. Maybe today I now realise these are very important issues and I would use an intimacy coach now. Maybe I was a bit pretentious in thinking that I had 30/35 years' experience and that I had more experience than an intimacy coach because I had already directed intimate scenes in my films. I would now take more pains to make the actresses more at ease. I've made a lot of films; sometimes you don't think enough about such issues.