Diane Kurys

Diane Kurys (; born 3 December 1948) is a French director, producer, filmmaker and actress. Several of her films as director are semi-autobiographical. Personal life Kurys was born in Lyon, Rhône, France, the younger of two daughters. She is a daughter of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants, Lena and Michel. Diane Kurys and her older sister spent their early years in Lyon. Like many of her film's characters, she had a difficult relationship with her parents, and her traumatic childhood became a subject in many of her films. Their parents met and got married at Camp de Rivesaltes in 1942, separating in 1954. Their divorce deeply marked and affected Diane, and would become a real source of inspiration for several of her films; Kurys stated that she made films about them because she “wanted to see them back together again.” It was after this event that her mom decided to move with her two daughters to Paris, where she ran a woman’s fashion boutique, while her dad stayed in Lyon where he ran a men's clothing store. She lived with her mother after their divorce in 1954, at one point running away to join her father at age sixteen. In her adolescence, she was radicalized in the spirit of May of '68, but became somewhat disillusioned in the aftermath, calling it a "revolution bourgeois" in an interview with Jean-Luc Wachthausen. She first met her partner and fellow filmmaker Alexandre Arcady when she was fifteen years old, in 1964, and went to live in Israel in a kibbutz near the Lebanese border. They have been a couple since the 1960s and have two production companies together. Their son Yasha, born in 1991, is an author writing under the name Sacha Sperling. Acting career As a student at the Jules Ferry high school, she studied modern literature at the Sorbonne before becoming a teacher and then a theatre actress in the 1970s, joining the Madeleine Renaud: Jean-Louis Barrault's company with Antoine Bourseiller and Ariane Mnouchkine at La Cartoucherie or Cafe de la Gare.