Few actresses in world cinema embody transformation as completely as Isabelle Huppert. Tireless, unpredictable, and endlessly fascinating, she has spent nearly five decades shifting from role to role without ever losing the intensity that defines her. This November, the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival dedicates its spotlight to Huppert, honoring not only a dazzling career but also her unique ability to make each character both utterly singular and unmistakably hers.
The festival presents 15 films that map the arc of her career, spanning different decades, countries, and collaborations. The selection reveals her almost alchemical gift for metamorphosis — a capacity to reinvent herself without losing coherence.
Isabelle Huppert, A Presence Beyond Categories
Huppert’s achievements are staggering: sixteen César nominations (a record), two César wins, a Golden Globe, an Academy Award nomination, major awards at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, and countless international distinctions. On stage, she holds the record for Molière nominations, underlining her dual mastery of cinema and theatre. Yet what makes her artistry distinctive is her refusal to be confined by safety, morality, or predictability. More than 120 films testify to an actress who seeks risk rather than comfort, ambiguity rather than certainty.
Her visit to Thessaloniki will include a public masterclass, From Screen to Stage, reflecting on the porous line between cinema and theatre. She will also meet audiences during screenings, host a press conference, and explore the city — its monuments, its culinary traditions, its texture.
Isabelle Huppert. Photo: Driu&Tiago (courtesy of TIFF).
Mapping the Career of Isabelle Huppert in 15 Films
The retrospective opens with The Richest Woman in the World (2025) by Thierry Klifa, inspired by the Bettencourt affair, where Huppert embodies a wealthy heiress at the center of a scandal. Her performance here, glamorous yet enigmatic, feels like a late-career synthesis of her magnetic contradictions.
Films such as Sidonie in Japan (2023), a tale of ghosts, memory, and renewal, and Ira Sachs’s Frankie (2019), about an actress facing her mortality, present more intimate portraits, where Huppert conveys fragility without surrendering strength.
Her boldness in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) remains one of the most acclaimed performances of the century — a harrowing, unsettling exploration of survival and power. On the other hand, in Valley of Love (2015), with Gérard Depardieu, she transforms grief into a metaphysical journey across the barren beauty of Death Valley. Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs (2015) places her absence at the center of a family drama, a ghostly role that still radiates presence.
The TIFF tribute celebrates the way an actress can redefine the very meaning of performance
The program also revisits classics such as White Material (2009) by Claire Denis, a searing portrait of colonial collapse; 8 Women (2002) by François Ozon, where her melodramatic turn explodes into camp brilliance; and The Piano Teacher (2001) by Michael Haneke, one of the most unsettling, incisive dissections of repression in modern cinema.
Earlier works remind us of her long-standing collaboration with Claude Chabrol — A Judgement in Stone (1995) and Story of Women (1988) — both ruthless dissections of class, morality, and hypocrisy. From Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994) to Joseph Losey’s The Trout (1982) and Michael Cimino’s infamous Heaven’s Gate (1980), Huppert’s choices reveal a relentless curiosity that transcends borders and genres.
The Actress as Explorer
What unites these films is not genre or style, but the radical commitment Huppert brings to each role, because she has embodied women who resist classification: defiant, fragile, cruel, tender, visionary, deluded. Her characters frequently unsettle audiences, forcing us to question not only them but ourselves.
To honor Isabelle Huppert is to honor an idea of cinema itself — as a space of risk, ambiguity, and transformation. Thessaloniki’s tribute is not simply a retrospective; it is an invitation to revisit how art can reshape reality, how an actress can redefine the very notion of performance.
Header photo © Milena Fontana (EL HYPE).
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