"French cinema's best-kept secret," as Sight & Sound called her, is out: Claire Denis' Beau Travail is Number One in Film Comment's 2000 Critics' Poll, and she was the only woman director to make the Village Voice's top ten list for the nineties. Raised in French West Africa, an aspect depicted in her auspicious debut film, Chocolat, Denis continues to probe the experience of outsiders in French society-gays, blacks, immigrants, dispossessed youth-not so much for their otherness as for their centrality in a nation of expatriates. With her stock company-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, cinematographer Agnès Godard, and actors like Grégoire Colin-Denis has created a sensual and contemplative cinema, what J. Hoberman has called "seductive fragments...committing the texture of life to film."
