Artist in Person

We are pleased to welcome the distinguished French director Bertrand Tavernier, whose numerous internationally acclaimed films include Coup de torchon (1981), A Sunday in the Country (1984), and 'Round Midnight (1985). Tavernier is also a respected critic and author of books on American cinema. Passionately committed to film history, he is the president of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, France.

"Bertrand Tavernier's superb Safe Conduct is an engrossing homage to those French filmmakers who, during the occupation, managed to maintain their integrity and professionalism under the most repressive circumstances. At once intimate drama and stirring historical epic, the film is loaded with suspense, for its central figure, an assistant director named Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), displays the same uflappability on the set as in his Resistance activities. Tavernier drew his richly detailed and shrewdly observed account of grace under pressure-and greedy collaborationist opportunism as well-from the reminiscences of Devaivre and the late Jean Aurenche, whose career was revived when Tavernier chose the veteran schreenwriter to help him launch his own career in the 1970s....Because Tavernier has always been as passionate a film historian as he is a filmmaker Safe Conduct has an acutely authentic sense of time and place....This film brims over with the humanity, seriousness, good humor and commitment that mark all of Tavernier's work."