Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek film director, screenwriter and producer known for an austere, absurdist style that blends deadpan comedy with unsettling premises. Emerging from the so-called Greek "weird wave" of the late 2000s, he built an international reputation with films marked by stilted dialogue, formal compositions and dark explorations of social control, desire and power. He has received multiple Academy Award nominations and has worked repeatedly with actors including Emma Stone, Colin Farrell and Olivia Colman.

Early life

Lanthimos was born in Athens in 1973. He studied film and television direction at the Stavrakos Film School in Athens. Early in his career he directed television commercials, music videos and theatre productions, and he was involved in the staging of events connected to the cultural programming around the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. These years of commercial and stage work helped shape the precise visual control that would later define his feature films.

Career

His first widely noticed feature was "Kinetta" (2005), but it was "Dogtooth" (2009) that brought him international attention. The film, about a family whose children are raised in extreme isolation, won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He followed it with "Alps" (2011), which competed at the Venice Film Festival.

Lanthimos then began making English-language films. "The Lobster" (2015), a dystopian satire about a society that forces single people to find partners or be turned into animals, won the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned him and co-writer Efthymis Filippou an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" (2017) continued his partnership with Colin Farrell and shared the best screenplay prize at Cannes.

Recent work

"The Favourite" (2018), a period drama set in the court of Queen Anne, became his biggest mainstream success to that point, receiving ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture; Olivia Colman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. "Poor Things" (2023), adapted from Alasdair Gray's novel and starring Emma Stone, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a further set of Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Stone, while Lanthimos was again nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. In 2024 he released "Kinds of Kindness," an anthology film, and he has continued to collaborate with the same core group of performers and craftspeople, maintaining a distinctive authorial voice within contemporary cinema.