‘Gare du Nord - Claire Simon’

Paris, the Gare du Nord, anything can come along, even trains. We’d like to stay but we have to hurry on... Like the thousands of lives that intersect at the station, Ismaël, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan are going to meet there. Every day, Ismaël is dazzled, fascinated and exhausted by the place. He sees Mathilde for the first time on a suburban train platform. They gradually fall in love. They meet Sacha and Joan. Sacha is looking for his missing daughter while Joan spends her life in the station between Lille, London and Paris. The station is a world apart, frequented by everyone: the French, immigrants, emigrants, travellers, and ghosts. It’s an intersection where each life passes quickly and vanishes.

Claire Simon

Born in London in 1955, Claire Simon was raised in France in the Var. Acknowledged for her work as a director, she is also a screenwriter, an actress, a director of photography and an editor. Refusing to follow a classic cinema course, she made her first films on her own in the mid-1970s. It is through the editing and a passage at Ateliers Varan that she continued her schooling. Her film work navigates graciously and subtly - without ever getting lost - between documentary and fiction. This prolific director has more than 15 films to her credit. Among her most notable films are "La Police" (short film, from 1988) or "Scènes de ménage" (short film, from 1991), "Les Patients" (1989), "Récréations" and "Coûte que coûte", "Sinon oui" - her first feature film (1997), "Ça brüle", her second feature film (2006), "Les bureaux de Dieu" in 2008, "800 km de différence / Romance", "Mimi", "Gare du Nord", "Géographie Humaine" and "Les bois dont les rêves sont faits". 

On the occasion of the BOZAR CINEMA DAYS (6 - 10.01.2016), BOZAR will present three films of the director: Le bois dont les rêves sont faits (2015), Géographie Humaine (2013) and Gare du Nord (2013).