Serge Toubiana

Born in 1949, Serge Toubiana worked as a film critic, journalist, and editor for the journal Les Cahiers du Cinéma from 1974 to 2000. He is the author of numerous publications on cinema, including a biography of François Truffaut that he co-wrote with Antoine de Baecque (Gallimard, 1996), which has been translated into many languages, and books on the work of Amos Gitai, Maurice Pialat, and John Huston’s film The Misfits (using images from the archives of Magnum Photos). He has also published his memoires in which he chronicles his life as a cinephile (Les fantômes du souvenir, Grasset, 2016), and, more recently, a collection of studies on cinema titled Le temps de voir (Seuil, 2017). He has produced numerous radio programs on film-related subjects for France Culture and has directed many documentaries, including François Truffaut, portraits volés (co-directed with Michel Pascal in 1993) and Isabelle Huppert, une vie pour jouer (2000). In 2015, he wrote the script for the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, which was directed by Kent Jones. He served as director general of La Cinémathèque Française from May 2003 to January 2016, where he curated exhibitions including Renoir/Renoir, Maurice Pialat: Peintre & Cinéaste, and François Truffaut), and as president of the CNC’s Avance sur Recettes Committee in 2014 and 2015. He was elected president of UniFrance on July 6, 2017, for a term of two years, and was reelected in 2019 for a second term.