Asia Argento

The daughter of filmmaker Dario Argento and actress Daria Nicolodi, Asia Argento nabbed her first role at age 11 in Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2 (1986). She has long maintained her attachment to the genre, collaborating with Michele Soavi (The Church, 1989) and George A. Romero (Land of the Dead, 2005) as well as her father, master of the giallo, on Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and The Phantom of the Opera (1998). At the same time, she has worked with filmmakers such as Nanni Moretti (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989), Patrice Chéreau (Queen Margot, 1994), Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette, 2006) and Gus Van Sant, for whom she played a character inspired by Courtney Love in Last Days opposite Michael Pitt in 2005. In 2000, she directed her first feature film, Scarlet Diva, conceived as her real and fantasized private diary. In 2004, she directed and played the lead role in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, the chronicle of a young boy torn between a drug addict prostitute mother and religious grandparents. With Misunderstood (2014), Asia Argento again took on the issue of childhood neglect in a pop-culture dive into the heart of the 1980s. Having served on the Gerardmer Fantasy Film Festival feature film jury in 1999, the multi-talented Italian artist returned in 2020 as Jury President, making her the first woman to assume this role in the festival’s history.

Festival international du film fantastique de Gérardmer