Sébastien Lifshitz

After studying art history at the Ecole du Louvre, Sébastien Lifshitz began working in the world of contemporary art in 1990. Few years after, he turns to the cinema and directs various short movies, such as Open Bodies (1998), Cold Lands (1999) for TV Channel ARTE. The film was selected for the Venice Film Festival. In 2000, he directed his first full-length feature, Come Undone, hailed by the critics and released internationally. In 2001, his second full-length feature, a documentary - road movie entitled The Crossing, was selected for the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes. In 2004, he began shooting Wild Side, which went on to be selected for numerous international festivals and won, among other awards, the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy. In 2009, he shot Going South, which was selected for the 2010 Berlin Film Festival. Then, in 2012, he directed The Invisibles, a documentary film selected in Cannes Film Festival. The movie won the Cesar 2013 for best documentary film. In 2013, Sébastien Lifshitz has directed the documentary portrait of Bambi, one of the first french transsexual woman, which was selected at the Berlinale 2013 and won for the second time the Teddy Award. In 2016, he returned to one of The Invisibles’s witness for The lives of Therese. The documentary film was selected at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes and won the Queer Palm. 

The same year, Sebastien Lifshitz has curated a large exhibition based on his vernacular photography collection of cross-dressers. Mauvais Genre, cross-dressers in a century of amateur photography was shown for the first time at Les Rencontres d’Arles, then in Paris at Galerie Agnès b. and in London at the Photographers’ Gallery in 2018. Mauvais Genre exhibition will also be shown in 2020 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In Fall 2019, on the occasion of the release of his new film Teenagers and of his book L’Inventaire infini, the Centre Pompidou organizes a retrospective exhibition gathering his photographs and films.