Serge Toubiana

CRITIC AND CULTURAL MANAGER
FRANCE

A journalist and cultural manager who has been instrumental in understanding the evolution of cinema over the last half-century. He edited ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ between 1982 and 2000; served as general delegate of the Association Premier siècle du cinéma (between 1993 and 1995); was director of La Cinémathèque française between 2003 and 2015; chaired Unifrance between 2017 and 2023; and worked as an author and producer of numerous radio shows on cinema for the public broadcaster France Culture. He has directed numerous documentaries, including ‘François Truffaut: Stolen Moments’ (1993), ‘Isabelle Huppert: A Gypsy Life’ (2001), ‘Chaplin Today: The Great Dictator’ (2003), and ‘Michael Haneke: Le Septième Continent’ (2005), as well as the television series ‘Chaplin Today’ (2002). He has also contributed to the screenplays of works such as ‘I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, Sister and Brother...’ (René Allio, 1976), ‘Depardieu, vivre aux éclats’ (Jean-Claude Guidicelli, 2000), ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ (Kent Jones, 2015) and ‘François Truffaut, My Life, a Screenplay’ (David Teboul, 2024). As a writer, he has published books like ‘Les Fantômes du souvenir’ (2016), ‘Le Temps de voir’ (2016), ‘Les Bouées jaunes’ (2018), ‘L’Amie américaine’ (2020), the recent ‘On ne connaît du film que la scène des adieux’ (2025), and ‘Le Fils de la maîtresse’ (2022), which won him the Marcel Pagnol Prize. His literary work includes coordinating, alongside Jean-Michel Frodon and Marc Nicolas, the collective work ‘Le Cinéma vers son deuxième’, as well as and in-depth analyses of filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, and Yasujirō Ozu, among many others. In 2004, Seminci published in Spain his monograph ‘El cine de Amos Gitai: exilios y territorios’.