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Pierre-Antoine Rousseau trained in filmmaking at ESEC in Paris and in acting at Cours Florent. He first worked in the film industry as a location manager, production assistant, and editor before fully dedicating himself to directing and acting, performing on stage.
After spending three years in Afghanistan, where he directed institutional films for international organizations such as the United Nations and Handicap International, he returned to France and co-founded RGfilms, a production company through which he led several documentary projects, while simultaneously continuing his theatrical career.
In the years that followed, he gradually stepped away from production and directing to devote himself more fully to stage work, before eventually setting all of these activities aside.
For a long time, he questioned his place. He searched for where and how to be, how to conduct himself, carrying a deep sense of always having been outside the frame.
He came to understand the importance of connecting body and mind in all dimensions of life. He opened himself to various practices such as yoga, meditation, freediving, NLP, bioenergetics, and self-induced cognitive trance.
Today, he is fully dedicated to personal development, exploring the deep connections between creative expression and inner well-being. He is currently preparing a book on fear, the creation of a space for expression, as well as a mountain refuge.
Sandra Bourdonnec is a French, Caribbean, and Italian artist based in Berlin, active across theatre, film, and music. A graduate of the Cours Florent in Paris, she has appeared at leading Berlin venues including the Schaubühne and Maxim Gorki Theater, collaborating with directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Marta Górnicka, and David Stöhr. Her film work includes roles in Ilker Çatak’s I Was, I Am, I Will Be and Jules Hermann’s Alle 7 Jahre. As a director and writer, she has created stage works such as Vicistica and Veiller sur un ange, as well as several independent films. In 2024, she premiered her first solo stage performance, Blue Bird. Alongside her acting career, she is a singer-songwriter and co-founder of the electro-pop band DRIFTINGS, whose debut album All is Drifting will be released in 2025.
Veniamine Borissovitch Smekhov, born on August 10, 1940, in Moscow, is a Russian actor, director, writer, documentary filmmaker, and television host.
In 1957, he was admitted to Vladimir Etush’s class at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute. Graduating in 1961, his career began at the Samara Drama Theatre. The following year, he joined the Moscow Drama and Comedy Theatre, which in 1964 became the Taganka Theatre under the direction of Yuri Lyubimov. In 1985, after Lyubimov was deprived of his Soviet citizenship following an interview with The Times in 1984, and Anatoly Efros replaced him, Smekhov left the theatre for Sovremennik Theatre, returning in 1987.
His film career began in 1968, but true popularity came with the role of Athos in “D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers” directed by Georgiy Jungvald-Khilkevitch.
After studying visual arts and cinema, Arthur Nauzyciel entered the Théâtre National de Chaillot school directed by Antoine Vitez in 1987.
He created his first stage productions in 1999.
He works regularly in the United States and also stages dance and opera. He directed the CDN d’Orléans from 2007 to 2016 and has been director of the Théâtre National de Bretagne since 2017.
Born in Switzerland, Marthe Keller began her career in Berlin before appearing in Le Diable par la queue (1971) and Toute une vie (1974). She also worked in the USA alongside Dustin Hofmann, William Holden, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. She also appeared in Les Yeux noirs by Nikita Mikhalkov, Hereafter by Clint Eastwood and Amnesia by Barbet Schroeder. In 2018, she starred in L’Ordre des médecins, by David Roux, then in the series The Romanoffs by Matthew Weiner. She was named Best Supporting Actress for the role of Kathy in Petite Sœur. In 2022, she acted in the series Marie-Antoinette by Pete Travis. Marthe Keller also enjoys classical music. She played Jeanne d’Arc in Arthur Honegger’s oratorio, and Michael Jarrell dedicated Cassandre to her based on the novel by Christa Wolf. In 1999, she directed her first production for the Opéra National du Rhin, Dialogues des Carmélites, followed by Don Giovanni for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Isabelle Huppert is a French actress and producer. A loyal collaborator of Claude Chabrol, Benoît Jacquot and Michael Haneke, Isabelle Huppert alternates between stage and screen, art house cinema and mainstream films. She was introduced to the general public by filmmaker Claude Goretta in 1977 in the film The Lacemaker.
She is one of the most prolific actresses in France (two or three films per year on average) and one of the few French performers whose filmography is truly international: her demanding and recognized career has led her to shoot in the United States (under the direction of Michael Cimino, Hal Hartley, Curtis Hanson, Joseph Losey, David O. Russell, and Otto Preminger), in Italy (with the Taviani brothers, Mauro Bolognini, Marco Ferreri, and Marco Bellocchio), in Russia (with Igor Minaiev), in Central Europe (with Michael Haneke, Werner Schroeter, Andrzej Wajda, Ursula Meier, Márta Mészáros, or Aleksandar Petrović), and even on the Asian continent (with Hong Sang-soo, Brillante Mendoza, or Rithy Panh).
Her theatrical career also leads her to work under the direction of renowned directors such as Bob Wilson, Claude Régy, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jacques Lassalle, or Luc Bondy, and to interpret contemporary authors such as Yasmina Reza or Florian Zeller.
She has received numerous international awards: two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival, two Volpi Cups for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, a Silver Bear for Best Artistic Contribution and an Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale, two European Film Awards for Best Actress, as well as a Lola in Germany, a BAFTA in the United Kingdom, and a David di Donatello in Italy.
In France, she is the actress with the most nominations at the César Awards with sixteen nominations. She has won the César Award for Best Actress twice, in 1996 for Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie and in 2017 for Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, which also earned her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Film and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
In 2017, she received the Europe Theatre Prize.
On November 25, 2020, The New York Times ranked her as the best actress of the 21st century, citing Denzel Washington as the best actor.
Source translated from : wikipedia
Canadian actor, movement specialist and director Alexis Milligan practices and teaches a diverse range of work from theatre and film to movement direction and puppetry. Among her acting credits are eight seasons with Two Planks and a Passion Theatre, with which Rosalind (As You Like It) and Beowulf earned her Merritt Award nominations. Her choreography and movement creation includes being Movement Director at the Shaw Festival, and movement and puppetry director for the National Theatre of Norway’s A Christmas Carol. Milligan’s passion project is her interdisciplinary performance company, Transitus Creative, specialising in Art Communication and public engagement through the arts. She sits on the steering committees for the Canadian Network of Imagination and Creativity, and for the Atlantic Centre for Creativity, and is a regular guest teacher at NYU Tisch School for the Performing Arts.
After starting his career as a teacher, René-Claude Emery changed direction in 2002 and became an actor. He graduated from the Serge Martin Theatre School in 2005.
At the Teatro Comico in Sion, Les Artpenteurs and Le Pulloff in Lausanne, and the Théâtre des Osses in Fribourg, he has tried his hand at classics such as Le Roman de Renart, Le Fabuleux La Fontaine, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Gorky’s Les Bas-Fonds, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, various Molière plays, Seneca and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
In a more contemporary vein, he has performed plays by Louis Calaferte, Blandine Costaz, Jean-Claude Blanc, Eric Masserey, Bastien Fournier, Julien Mages, Howard Barker and, most recently, Coline Ladetto and Jon Fosse. He has also taken part in a clown duo in a selection of classics of the genre.
In 2015, he staged his first professional production of Antonin Artaud’s radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu in the gardens of the Malévoz psychiatric hospital. At the same time, he writes for the theatre and has founded his own company: La Compagnie du CHARIOT-MIROIR.
He was born Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinow on April 16, 1921 in Swiss Cottage, London, the son of Nadezhda Leontievna (Benois) and Jonah Freiherr von Ustinow. His father was of one-quarter Polish Jewish, one-half Russian, one-eighth Ethiopian, and one-eighth German descent, while his mother was of one-half Russian, one-quarter Italian, one-eighth French, and one-eighth German ancestry. Ustinov had ancestral connections to Russian nobility as well as to the Ethiopian Royal Family. His father, also known as “Klop”, was a pilot in the German Air Force during World War I. In 1919, Peter’s father joined his own mother and sister in St. Petersburg, Russia. There he met his future wife, artist Nadia Benois, who worked for the Imperial Mariinsky Ballet and Opera House in St. Petersburg. In 1920, in a modest and discreet ceremony at a Russian-German church in St. Petersburg, Ustinov’s father married Nadia. In February 1921, when she was seven months pregnant with Peter, the couple emigrated from Russia in the aftermath of the Communist Revolution.
Young Peter was brought up in a multilingual family. He was fluent in Russian, French, Italian and German, as well as English. He attended Westminster College (1934-37), took the drama and acting class under Michel St. Denis at the London Theatre Studio (1937-39), and made his stage debut in 1938 in a theatre in Surrey. The following year, he made his London stage debut in a revue sketch, then had regular performances with Aylesbury Repertory Company. In 1940 he made his film debut in Hullo, Fame! (1940).
From 1942 to 1946 Ustinov served as a private soldier with the British Army’s Royal Sussex Regiment. He was batman for David Niven, and the two became lifelong friends. Ustinov spent most of his service working with the Army Cinema Unit, where he was involved in making recruitment films, wrote plays and appeared in three films as an actor. At that time he co-wrote and acted in L’héroïque parade (1944) (aka “The Immortal Battalion”).
Ustinov had a stellar film career as actor, director, and writer. Among his numerous screen acting gems were his unparalleled, Academy Award-nominated interpretation of Nero in Quo Vadis (1951) and roles in Max Ophüls’s masterpiece Lola Montès (1955), Barefoot in Athens (1966), Les comédiens (1967), Robin des Bois (1973) and L’Âge de cristal (1976). He also wrote and directed such brilliant films as Billy Budd (1962), Lady L (1965) and Memed My Hawk (1984). He was awarded two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, one for his role in Spartacus (1960) and one for his role in Topkapi (1964), and received two more Oscar nominations as an actor and writer. His career slowed down a bit in the 1970s, but made a comeback as Hercule Poirot in Mort sur le Nil (1978) by director John Guillermin. In the 1980s, Ustinov recreated Poirot in several subsequent television movies and theatrical films, such as Meurtre au soleil (1982) and Rendez-vous avec la mort (1988), while his cinema work in the 1990s also includes his superb performance as Professor Gus Nikolais in George Miller’s excellent dramatic film Lorenzo (1992), a character partially inspired by Hugo Wolfgang Moser, a research scientist who had been director of the Neurogenetics Research Center at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University.
His expertise in dialectic and physical comedy made him a regular guest of talk show hosts and late-night comedians. His witty and multidimensional humor was legendary, and he later published a collection of his jokes and quotations summarizing his wide popularity as a raconteur. He was also an internationally acclaimed TV journalist. Ustinov covered over 100,000 miles and visited more than 30 Russian cities during the making of his well-received BBC television series Russia (1986).
In his autobiographies, “Dear Me” (1977) and “My Russia” (1996), Ustinov revealed his observations on his life, career, and his multicultural and multi-ethnic background. He wrote and directed numerous stage plays, successfully presenting them in several countries. His drama, “Photo Finish”, was staged in New York, London and St. Petersburg, Russia, where Ustinov directed the acclaimed production, starring Elena Solovey and Pyotr Shelokhonov.
In addition to his acting and writing, Ustinov served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and a president of WFM, a global citizens movement. He was knighted in 1990. From 1971 until his death in 2004, Ustinov lived in a château in Bursins, Vaud, Switzerland. He died of heart failure on March 28, 2004, in a clinic in Genolier, Vaud, Switzerland. His funeral service was held at Geneva’s historic Cathedral of St. Pierre, and he was laid to rest in the village cemetery of Bursins. He was survived by three daughters (Tamara, Pavla, and Andrea) and one son (Igor). His epitaph may be gleaned from his comment, “I am an international citizen conceived in Russia, born in England, working in Hollywood, living in Switzerland, and touring the World”.