Born in Tunisia and raised in France, where he continues to live and work, Abdellatif Kechiche (b. 1960) is the recipient of the eleventh McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking, awarded by Harvard's Film Study Center. In honor of this occasion, the Harvard Film Archive presents a retrospective of his three features which all focus on the lives of France’s Arab communities. While mainstream French cinema typically associates this community with criminality and drugs, arranged marriages and fundamentalist Islam, Kechiche instead devotes himself to patiently detailing the daily life of the richly diverse communities made up by French Arabs, from teenagers in the Parisian suburbs’ gritty apartment blocks to multigenerational families in the country’s lush South.

Kechiche began his career as an actor, and his theater training is evident in the spontaneous performances of his often non-professional actors whose vivid presence often recalls the work of John Cassavetes. And like Cassavetes, Kechiche has adopted a loose, observational visual style that gives his work an improvisational, even documentary feel. His characters are often emphatic, but they rarely seem larger than life; rather, their exuberance brims with real emotion. In Kechiche’s hands the carefully modulated performances of his actors and his evocative yet restrained visual style are important tools to capture the specificities of a vibrant community without exoticizing it.