Ariane Labed

Building a Strange Body

Ariane Labed was not born in France. Her parents were French, but she was born in Athens in 1984 and spent her childhood moving between Greece and Germany. This lack of fixed geographic roots explains her ability to inhabit characters who always seem out of place.

She studied theater at the University of Provence, where she founded the Vasistas company. Her training doesn't come from traditional acting schools but from dance and physical theater. Labed builds her roles through movement and silence rather than dialogue.

It was a dazzling debut.

In 2010, she starred in Attenberg under the direction of Athina Rachel Tsangari. She had no prior experience in front of the camera, but she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. That award placed her at the center of the so-called Greek New Wave.

During that shoot, she met director Yorgos Lanthimos. She worked with him on Alps in 2011 and later played the maid in The Lobster in 2015. But her career never depended on a single male gaze or on a single national territory.

The leap into the global film industry

In 2016, she agreed to take part in the blockbuster Assassin's Creed. It was a strange project for an actress seasoned in the most radical European auteur cinema. She earned a six-figure salary for playing Maria and shared the screen with Michael Fassbender.

And the gamble paid off.

That foray into Hollywood didn't change her approach to choosing scripts. In 2018, she took part in Mary Magdalene, and in 2019 she shot the series Trigonometry for the BBC. In the latter production, she explored polyamory in a gentrified London with a naturalness that sidestepped any forced scandal.

Yet her professional ambitions had a turn toward total authorship. After years in front of the spotlight, she decided she needed to control the framing and the rhythm of the editing.

An Obsession with Technical Control

In 2019, she directed her first short film, titled Olla. The story of a woman from Eastern Europe who arrives in France after answering a contact ad won the award for best short at Sundance. Labed showed a visual maturity unusual for a first-time director.

There was no turning back.

In 2024, she premiered her first feature film as a director at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is titled September Says and adapts the novel Sisters by writer Daisy Johnson. French critics praised her technical precision in capturing the claustrophobia of family relationships.

For her, cinema is about space and how bodies collide with one another. In 2021, she also joined the cast of The Souvenir Part II, directed by Joanna Hogg. Her schedule now combines developing new original scripts with supporting roles in high-quality independent productions.

The production of her debut feature in 2024 received €400,000 in financial support from the European Eurimages fund.