Mr. Nicolas Seydoux serves as the President of Gaumont, one of the major film companies in France and the longest operating. Nicolas Seydoux is also Vice President of the supervisory board of Arte France. He holds degrees in Law and Economics from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris.

Combining production, distribution, park facilities and one of the most prestigious film catalogs in the world, Gaumont is a major player in the film industry. Its history is inseparably intertwined with the Seventh Art, and the company’s 120-year history give it a unique status, particularly thanks to its accumulated experience and ability to constantly innovate. In recent years, Gaumont has intensified its activity by producing, financing and distributing films and series globally, in both French and English.

Gaumont has the second richest catalog of films in France, with over 900 titles, including works by prestigious directors such as Luc Besson, Mathieu Kassovitz, Francis Veber, Jean-Jacques Beineix and classics by Federico Fellini, Maurice Pialat or Jean-Luc Godard. In 2003, the Gaumont and Pathé companies—two of the biggest film studio names worldwide—created the Gaumont-Pathé Archives and combined their extraordinary holdings. With more than 14000 hours of black & white and color films gathered and consolidated in once place since 1896, along with contributions from across the world continuously added to the collection, the Gaumont-Pathé Archives now offer one of the largest motion picture catalogues.

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Régis Wargnier is a French film director, producer and screenwriter. He started his career as an assistant director in 1972 with La femme en Bleue directed by Michel Deville. Several collaborations for the cinema and television followed with different directors such Claude Chabrol, Francis Girod and Patrice Leconte. In 1986, he directed his first feature film La femme de ma vie, the story of a violonist whose life begins to spiral down with alcohol. The film was nominated five times at the César’s and won the prize for best debut feature.

In 1991, after directing Je suis le seigneur du chateau, Régis Wargnier released his most successful and critically acclaimed film to date, Indochine. Set in French Indochina during the politically turbulent 1930s, the film stars Catherine Deneuve as a plantation owner who becomes involved in a love triangle between a handsome French soldier and her beloved adopted Asian daughter. The film was a hit at the French Box Office and won Best Foreign Language Picture at the 65^th Academy Awards in 1993. Deneuve and Wargnier collaborated again in 1999 on his fifth feature film, East/West, a romantic drama paying tribute to the victims of Soviet Stalinism. In 2005, Wargnier directed Man to Man starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes, a controversial historical drama about anthropologists who hunt and capture pygmies for study back in Europe. In 2014, he returned to South-East Asia, this time Cambodia, with Le temps des aveux (The Gate). Set during the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, the film relates the real-life story of François Bizot, a French ethnologist working in the ruins of Angkor, who is imprisoned by the regime.

Catherine Deneuve is an iconic French actress of international repute. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof, mysterious beauties for a number of directors, including Luis Buñuel and Roman Polanski. A 14-time César nominee, she won awards for her performances in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) and Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), for which she received an Academy Award. She also won the 1998 Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Place Vendôme, and the 2002 Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for 8 Women. Other films include Scene of the Crime (1986), My Favourite Season (1993) and Potiche (2010). Her English-language films include The April Fools (1969), Hustle (1975), The Hunger (1983) and Dancer in the Dark (2000).

Deneuve made her film debut in 1957 and first came to prominence in Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, before going on to star for Polanski in Repulsion (1965) and for Buñuel in Belle de Jour (1967) and Tristana (1970). A star of wide international recognition, Deneuve has worked with some of France’s top filmmakers such as André Téchiné, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Corneau, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Philippe de Broca, Philippe Garrel, and Benoît Jacquot. European collaborations include work with Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Marco Ferreri, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, Lars von Trier, and across the Atlantic she has worked with Terence Young, Tony Scott, and Robert Aldrich. Deneuve’s career intersects with a new generation of filmmakers such as Gaël Morel, François Ozon, Marjane Satrapi, Christophe Honoré, Arnaud Desplechin, and Emmanuelle Bercot.

Socially engaged, Catherine Deneuve supports a variety of causes including women’s rights, abolishing the death penalty, and aiding war refugees. An ambassador for the preservation of film heritage at UNESCO, she has been a distinguished guest of Memory! International Heritage Film Festival since 2014. In October this year, she received the prestigious Lumière Award for lifetime achievement and contributions to the cinema industry.

Davy Chou is a French-Cambodian filmmaker and producer born in 1983. He is the grandson of Van Chann, a leading film producer in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, he established a filmmaking workshop in Phnom Penh and founded a collective for young Cambodian filmmakers. Golden Slumbers (2011), a documentary about the birth of Cambodian cinema in the 60’s and its subsequent destruction by the Khmer Rouge was his first feature-length film and was very well received at the Berlinale Forum and the Busan International Film Festival.

In 2014 in Phnom Penh, Davy Chou directed the short film Cambodia 2099, selected for the 2014 Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight. This film garnered a number of awards including the Great Prize of Curtas Vila do Conde. Adapted from this short film, Chou has just completed his first feature film, Diamond Island, which premiered in the International Critics’ Week section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) Award.

Davy Chou recently founded the company Anti-Archive, which aims to produce independent Cambodian films. He was part of the 1^st edition of the Memory Festival in 2013 which took place in Cambodia, and his enthusiasm for the local film industry has been instrumental in generating interest among younger generations of Cambodian filmmakers and filmgoers.

Pascale Ferran attended the IDHEC (National Film School, Paris) in 1980 where she met Arnaud Desplechin and Pierre Trividic, with whom she would later regularly collaborate. She then alternated between assistant director and scriptwriter, and also herself directed a number of short films including the renowned Le Baiser (The Kiss) in 1990. Petits arrangements avec les morts (Coming to Terms with the Dead) obtained the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes Film Festival in 1994. L’Age des possibles followed, written for the apprentice actors at the Ecole du Théâtre National de Strasbourg (France), which won the Fipresci Award at Venice Film Festival.

In 1999, she directed the dubbing of the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In 2007, her adaptation of Lady Chatterley, based on D.H. Lawrence’s novel, garnered numerous awards including the Louis Delluc Prize and five Césars (including Best film). This same year, Ferran became president of the Un Certain Regard’s jury at Cannes. Socially engaged, Ferran doesn’t hesitate make her views known, in particular in a famous speech at the 2007 César Ceremony, during which she argued that the French film industry was losing its capacity to support films de milieu, midrange productions, that were historically the domain of commercial auteurs such as Jean Renoir, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais among others.

Her latest film, Bird People, was presented in Cannes in 2014 in the Un Certain Regard section. It was also screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2015, Pascale Ferran co-created and launched LaCinetek, a VOD platform dedicated to heritage films. In 2016, she co-wrote the screenplay The Red Turtle, an film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, which premiered at the Cannes film festival and competed in the Un Certain Regard section