Biography
French director and screenwriter Alice Winocour first made her name in short films before making the leap to full-length features with historical drama "Augustine" (2012) and home invasion thriller "Maryland" (2015). Born in Paris in 1976, Winocour attended her homeland's prestigious state film school, La Femis, and made her writing debut with the short "Orphee" (2003), an ancient Greek fable in which she also starred as oak nymph Eurydice. Two years later, she took the director's chair for the first time on "Kitchen" (2005), a short film which explored a loveless relationship via the theme of cooking, and followed it up with "Magic Paris" (2006), the story of a forty-something who encounters a charming stranger during a short weekend in the capital. Winocour then served as writer on "Home" (2008), a Swiss drama in which a rural family's life is disrupted by the belated opening of a nearby highway, and in the same year wrote and directed her third short, the long-distance relationship tale "Pina Colada" (2008). After adding to her screenwriting credits with Vladimir Perisic's unnerving military drama "Ordinary People" (2009), Winocour helmed her first feature film, "Augustine" (2012), a dark romance based on real-life 19th Century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's affair with one of his patients. Winocour then moved into genre filmmaking with "Maryland" (2015), a thriller in which an PTSD-suffering ex-soldier is hired to protect the wife of a wealthy businessman, and collaborated with Deniz Gamze Erguven on "Mustang" (2015), a drama about five orphaned sisters growing up in a conservative Turkish village.
