FACES IN FOCUS: THE VANGUARD

Constance Debré is always musing. Once a criminal lawyer, now a full-time writer, she approaches each with the same intellectual ferocity. Her trilogy—Playboy (2018), Love Me Tender (2020), and Nom (2022)—traces her unlearning of everything: comfort, convention, even herself. Living and writing in Paris, Constance finds no muse—only material. “Everything makes me think—which is much more interesting.”

Naïlia Harzoune trained in dance and acting at Paris’s W.A. Mozart Municipal Conservatory before finding her way to film. In Chouf, La Taularde, Made in France, and Patients, she gravitates towards stories of pressure and persistence. On screen, she brings a quiet intensity—the kind that never announces itself but always lands. Off screen, she watches people the same way she studies characters. “The seasons in Paris change people, their habits, the way they carry themselves, [and] their faces.”

Alma Jodorowsky moves between disciplines as if they were one. Actress, singer, director—each role folds into the next. The granddaughter of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, she shares his instinct for reinvention. “It’s important to take the risk of making mistakes in order to move forward,” she says. “I like to experiment and I’m no longer afraid of failure.” From Blue is the Warmest Colour to The Shock of the Future to her band Burning Peacocks, she shifts seamlessly.

Léonie Dahan-Lamort likes a city that doesn’t match. The actress finds beauty in the mix—the way no two people look or move the same. In films like La morsure, Les Éloignés, and Block Pass, she’s drawn to roles that have space for imperfection. She credits the #MeToo movement with teaching her to speak up, and lately, she’s focusing on using her voice for those who can’t.

Clara McGregor likes cities that keep her awake. The actress and producer was raised on film sets between London, Los Angeles, and New York, before going on to study photography and film. Paris reminds her why she started—its cafés, cinemas, and constant sense of story. “Living in the present” is her daily practice, but cinema remains her language.

Rebecca Marder has known the stage since she was five. Raised in a French-American family of artists, she joined the Comédie-Française at 20—as one of its youngest members—before turning her focus to film. In A Radiant Girl, and Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century, she explores what endures when everything else is at risk. “The one thing that can never be stolen from us, even in times of war, is our inner nourishment,” she says. “The poems we learn, the people we meet, the films we watch, the music that reaches us.”