Biography

Belgian film director and screenwriter. He was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2019.

Dhont was born in Ghent, Belgium. His mother, Hilbe is a fashion teacher at an art school. He has a younger brother Michiel who is a producer. As a teenager, Dhont worked as a costume design assistant on film and television sets.

He made his feature-length debut in 2018 with Girl (2018), a drama film inspired by the story of Nora Monsecour which focuses on a trans girl pursuing a career as a ballerina. Girl premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Caméra d'Or award for best first feature film, as well as the Queer Palm. It received the André Cavens Award for Best Film given by the Belgian Film Critics Association (UCC) and was selected as the Belgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards. It received nine nominations at the 9th Magritte Awards and won four, including Best Flemish Film and Best Screenplay for Dhont.

Dhont's second feature, Close (2022), starring Emilie Dequenne and Léa Drucker, premiered in competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where he shared the Grand Prix with Claire Denis' Stars at Noon (2022). It also won the Sydney Film Prize in June 2022. The film is based on his own experiences at school, and tells the story of the friendship between two boys in their early teens.

As of July 2021 Dhont is developing an untitled film with screenwriter Laurent Lunetta.
- IMDb mini biography by: yusufpiskin

[press conference for Close (2022) at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival] After Girl (2018), I had to get back to the blank page before me and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had all sorts of proposals of course, but at the same time I had lots of doubts, much more insecurity than when making Girl. Girl was based on intuition - I just forged ahead without really knowing what a film can do. In this case I was much more aware of myself and how other people looked at me. It therefore took me quite some time to understand exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something with the same intensity, with the same passion as with Girl - that was important for me. I began to write down all sorts of different ideas. I was racked by doubts and I returned to my primary school one day in the village where my mother lives. I took a long walk, I visited the school and I don't know why, but after Girl I wanted to remember the child I was, because it's probably for the sake of that child that I make my films. I went on a walk with my mother and I said, "Mum, I really don't know what I should do now." She said to me, with great confidence and trust, "Well, I'm sure that you actually know what you should do now." And that was the beginning of Close; that was the beginning of a film which I think has remained very faithful to what I want to be as a director and as a person.

I am constantly in this process of going beyond myself by trying to go beyond my own limits as a director. So I am always attracted, fascinated even, by characters able to break the norms that they are internal or external, and for whom it is even urgent to do so as it is necessary for them to achieve something else.

[press conference for Coward (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] The First World War is really part of our Belgian history; this war, this combat, took place on our soil. Almost every week when I drive with my partner, we go past the fields, the cemeteries, where you have so many young people who gave their lives for the war. And when I discovered a series of photos in black and white, amateur photos, I saw a group of Belgian men using ammunition boxes to create a podium, they were standing on them and they turned sandbags into skirts, ammunition into jewellery, and they were there acting and having fun. For me, that was the ultimate picture of resistance, it was an act of liberation. To see these men who were creating at that moment in time when they had to destroy everything. And of course I grew up with the First World War, when you go to school you learn about it, you go to Ypres to visit the trenches, but I had never seen those particular images and I realised that the memory has a kind of politics about it. There are certain images of the war that you are shown – you see these men who are violent and have to destroy things - and on the other hand, you have these pictures of creation, a time of grace, because the men are there for each other, it's a time of cooperation and I wondered why they hadn't been filmed as much. Whence the desire to make this film where it was a war where people were face to face, millions and millions of young men got killed. But when I looked at these photos and I read the newspapers, I saw how these men, despite the fact they were about to die, were still trying to find moments of pleasure, and also physically, and I found that very moving.