In the year that has seen the director premiere two new feature-length films recognised by awards at both the Berlin and Cannes film festivals, Batalha dedicates its first retrospective to Claire Denis. With a filmography spanning over five decades, Denis is one of the most influential, compelling and eclectic names in contemporary cinema.

Raised in colonial sub-Saharan Africa, Denis’s cinema was formed between various African countries and France, at the same time questioning the prejudices of European colonial culture and its myths of progress and success. Her films regularly feature flawed characters searching for love and redemption at the interstices of social standards, and it is in the narrative framework of her stories that her signature authorship and artistry reveal themselves. 

We present all of her feature-length films — 17 in total — from her debut in 1988 through to the present year. Over this time, Denis has cultivated a series of close collaborations with screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, musical composers and, most notoriously, actors. With them, she has created, maintained and continuously reinvented a subversive and fearless form of cinema, profoundly original, centered on belligerent faces and bodies that constantly flirt with life’s boundaries. Death, in this way, may be cheated.