Isabel Coixet
Isabel Coixet Castillo is a Spanish film director. She is one of the most prolific film directors of contemporary Spain, having directed twelve feature-length films since the beginning of her film career in 1988, in addition to documentary films, shorts, and commercials. Her films depart from the traditional national cinema of Spain, and help to “untangle films from their national context... clearing the path for thinking about national film from different perspectives.” The recurring themes of “emotions, feelings, and existential conflict” coupled with her distinct visual style secure the “multifaceted ” filmmaker's status as a “Catalan auteur.”
Early life
Isabel Coixet started filming when she was given an 8 mm camera on the occasion of her First Communion. After obtaining a BA degree in History at Barcelona University, where she majored in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century History, she worked in advertising and spot writing with a magazine called Fotogramas. She continued in the world of advertising, producing brilliant work and standing out as creative director of the agency JWT.Her illustrious client list included BMW, Renault and Ikea. She won several accolades for her spots, but the ads did not fulfill her expectations.
Coixet made her first short film in 1984: Mira y verás.
Career
In 1988, Coixet made her debut as a scriptwriter and director in Demasiado Viejo Para Morir Joven. For this movie, she was nominated at the Goya Awards as a Best New Director.In 1996, she traveled to the United States to shoot her first English-language feature film, entitled Things I Never Told You. This moving drama cast American actors led by Lili Taylor and Andrew McCarthy. Coixet received her second nomination at the Goya Awards for Best Original Screenplay. Coixet then connected with a French production company, and in 1998 she shot — for the first time in Spain and in Spanish — the historical adventure A los que aman. Two years later she founded her own production company, with which she produced her most acclaimed film to date, Mi vida sin mí. Since then she has been one of the most acclaimed directors of Spanish cinema.
In 2000, she founded her own production company called , for which she has produced over 400 commercials.
Her international success came in 2003 thanks to the intimate drama My Life Without Me. The film was based on a short story by Nancy Kincaid. Canadian actress Sarah Polley played Ann, a young mother who decides to hide from her family that she has terminal cancer. This Hispanic-Canadian co-production was highly praised at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Coixet then continued working with Polley on a new film, The Secret Life of Words, which was released in 2005 starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins and Javier Cámara. The film was awarded four Goyas: Best Film, Best Director, Best Production and Best Screenplay.
In 2005, Coixet joined eighteen other international filmmakers, among them Gus Van Sant, Walter Salles and Joel and Ethan Cohen, to make the groundbreaking collective project Paris, je t’aime, in which each director explored a different Paris quarter.
Coixet has also made prominent documentaries on major themes, such as Invisibles, which was selected for the "Panorama" section of the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, about the international medical organization Doctors Without Borders. Also the documentary Journey to the Heart of Torture, which was filmed in Sarajevo during the Balkan War and won an award at the October 2003 Human Rights Film Festival.
In April 2006, she was honored with the Creu de San Jordi De Cine Awards by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The Barcelona director received not one but two awards. In addition to the critical award for The Secret Life of Words as the best Spanish film, she also received the Rosa de Sant Jordi prize, voted by the audience of Radio Nacional de España, for the best production. The award ceremony was held at the Palau de la Música.
In 2008, Coixet released Elegy, which was filmed in Vancouver and produced by Lakeshore Entertainment. The film was based on Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal, was written for the screen by Nicholas Meyer, and starred Penélope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. Elegy was presented at the 58th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2009, as an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, she premiered the film Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, shot in both Japan and Barcelona and starring Rinko Kikuchi, Sergi López and Min Tanaka, with a script by Coixet herself. And at the Centre D'Art Santa Mònica, she inaugurated From I to J, an installation in honor of the work of John Berger.
That same year she received the Gold Medal for Fine Arts and was also part of the jury of the 59th edition of the Berlin Film Festival.
In April 2009 at the Centre d'Arts Santa Mónica in Barcelona and in April 2010 at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Coixet presented a monographic exhibition dedicated to the British writer, art critic, poet and artist John Berger entitled From I to J. A tribute by Isabel Coixet to John Berger, with the collaboration of the architect Benedetta Tagliabue and the participation of the actresses Penélope Cruz, Monica Bellucci, Isabelle Huppert, Maria de Medeiros, Sarah Polley, Tilda Swinton and Leonor Watling.
Also in 2009 she directed a short documentary called La mujer es cosa de hombres about male violence and the media. for a project entitled "50 years of..." about the history of Catalonia.
In 2010, she took on responsibility for the content of one of the three Spanish Pavilion lounges for the Expo Shanghai. Plus, she inaugurated the exhibition Aral. The Lost Sea, which shows her documentary with the same title, shot in Uzbekistan in 2009.
In 2011, within the "Berlinale Specials" section of the Berlin Film Festival, she premiered the documentary Listening to Judge Garzón giving voice to the Spanish magistrate through an interview with writer Manuel Rivas. The film won the Goya in the Best Documentary category.
During 2012, she directed a documentary about the 10 years of the Prestige disaster and the volunteers who participated in the recovery of the Galician coasts under the title White Tide.
That same year, Coixet shot and produced Ayer no termina nunca which premiered in the Panorama Section of the 63rd edition of the International Film Festival of Berlin. The film also opened the Málaga Film Festival the same year, where it won four Silver Biznagas in the categories Special Jury Prize, Best Actress, Best Photography and Best Editing, the last two prizes won by Jordi Azategui. In the end of 2012 she also started shooting a new project, which she finished in 2013, called Another Me, an English-language thriller written and directed by Coixet with a cast that featured Sophie Turner, Rhys Ifans, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Geraldine Chaplin, among others.
In the summer of 2013 she started shooting Learning to Drive, an American production developed in New York City, based on an article published in The New York Times and starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson, with whom Isabel Coixet had already worked in Elegy. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the Grolsch People's Choice Award.
Nobody Wants The Night was her next project, filmed in Norway, Bulgaria and the Canary Islands. The film starred Juliette Binoche, Rinko Kikuchi and Gabriel Byrne. The film opened the 66th Berlin International Film Festival to competition.
Coixet is always interested in shooting documentaries to denounce what she doesn't agree with or to give voice to her protagonists. She shot a documentary in Chad at the end of 2014 narrated by Juliette Binoche entitled Talking about Rose: Prisoner of Hissène Habré. The piece relates the experience of a group of torture victims in their struggle to bring the former Chadian dictator to justice, an effort led by US human rights lawyer Reed Brody.
During the 2015 edition of the Málaga Festival, the prize was awarded to her entire career and it was presented a retrospective documentary of her work, commissioned by the Festival itself, Words, Maps, Secrets And Other Things, directed by Elena Trapé.
Also in 2015 she received the recognized prize of the French Ministry of Culture of Knight of Arts and Letters.
During 2015 and 2016, Isabel Coixet directs the project Spain in a Day, the Spanish version of the documentary crowdsourcing project produced by Mediapro. The project aims to portray the reality of a country reflected by hundreds of domestic videos recorded during the same day and that has had as direct precedents Britain in a Day and Italy in a Day. In the case of Spain in a Day, the videos were recorded on 24 October 2015 by thousands of volunteers.
In the summer of 2016 she directed the feature film The Bookshop. The script adapted by Coixet was based on the novel of the same name by the English writer Penelope Fitzgerald and received the prize for the best literary adaptation at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2017. The film was shot in Northern Ireland and Barcelona, starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson. The Bookshop inaugurated the SEMINCI 2017, as a world premiere, receiving good reviews and it was commercially released in Spain on November 10, with a very positive critical reception and great public success.
The Bookshop was premiered outside Spain in a "Berlinale Special Gala" at the 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival, which took place in February 2018.
In February of 2019, Coixet released the film Elisa y Marcela in collaboration with Netflix The film, based on the first registered same-sex marriage in Spain, was the third original Spanish film by Netflix.
Productions
Isabel Coixet created her own production company in 2000, , with the vocation to self-produce her own more personal projects. The production company has dedicated itself basically to advertising, the making of video clips, documentaries and a fictional feature film, but also to projects outside the audiovisual sector, such as exhibitions, books and other types of cultural projects. Among the main projects, directed and produced by Isabel Coixet, are the documentary '50 años de...
On the occasion of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of TVE Catalunya Isabel Coixet, along with fifteen other Catalan documentary filmmakers, had the idea of capturing in images, taken from the archive of Televisión Española, the last half Spanish century. The programme 50 years of... is in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the first TVE broadcast in Catalonia, whose first headquarters was the mythical Miramar Hotel in Barcelona, which was maintained for twenty-four years, until 1983, when the production center was moved to San Cugat del Vallés. There has been a second season, as well as a third entitled Cómo hemos cambiado.Personal life and Political Views
Coixet has a daughter, Zoe, born in 1997, a year after the release of her first feature, Things I Never Told You. She lives in Barcelona with her husband, DJ and musician César Sala.Coixet has shared opinions on the debate around the Catalan Independence Movement and was involved in creating a publicity campaign for the Spanish political party the PSOE.
Style and Themes
Coixet's work as a director is striking for being, as The New York Times describes her, “unclassifiable.” Depending on the film, she shoots in English or Spanish, and subjects are diverse. Coixet's trademark is her filmmaking technique, which was derived from her background in advertising, where visuals, color, and composition are carefully constructed. She works as the camera operator on all of her films.Among her most recurrent themes we can find a concern for communication, for words as a way of conventional understanding between people and that usually do not have the effect we expect. As she herself has acknowledged on occasion, she is obsessed with those situations in which messages do not reach their recipient.
Another of her signs of identity is her marked social commitment, both with themes such as global warming and with social themes.
Love and solitude are also constant in her cinema, in a very deep and spiritual way, nothing topical and stereotyped, although there is a common place recognizable in several of her productions that is the laundry.
The filmmaker's approach to her characters and their stories is surprising because of her ability to get them in deep. To offer them to the spectator with a simple but tremendously transparent view.
This search for connection is influenced by one of her great referents: the poet John Berger, from whom she draws, in his own words, the conviction that "anything can explain the world" through the connection between poetry, philosophy, etc.
In Coixet's universe, spiritual connections between people are combined with a strong social consciousness, always ready to denounce the injustices of the world.
In addition, Isabel Coixet's political and feminist involvement is evident. For example, The Secret Life of Words is a film that denounces the rape of a certain woman in a certain conflict: the Balkan War.
Filmography
- TBA It Snows in Benidorm
- 2019 Elisa & Marcela
- 2017 The Bookshop
- 2016 :es:Un corazón roto no es como un jarrón roto o un florero|Un corazón roto no es como un jarrón roto o un florero
- 2016 Spain in a Day
- 2015 Nobody Wants the Night
- 2015 Talking about Rose, a documentary film about the life of Rose Lokissim
- 2014 Learning to Drive
- 2013 Another Me
- 2013 Yesterday Never Ends
- 2012 White Tide
- 2011 Listening to Judge Garzón
- 2010 Aral. The Lost Sea
- 2009 Map of the Sounds of Tokyo
- 2008 Elegy
- 2007 '
- 2006 París je t’aime: Bastille
- 2005 The Secret Life of Words
- 2004 '
- 2003 My Life Without Me
- 1998 A los que aman
- 1996 Things I Never Told You
- 1989 Demasiado viejo para morir joven
- 1984 Mira y verás
Awards
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 1989 | Best New Director | Too Old To Die Young | - | |
| 1997 | Best Original Screenplay | Things I Never Told You | ||
| 2004 | Best Director | My Life Without Me | ||
| 2004 | Best Adapted Screenplay | My Life Without Me | ||
| 2006 | Best Production Supervision | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2006 | Best Original Screenplay | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2006 | Best Director | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2006 | Best Film | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2008 | Best Documental Film | :es:Invisibles |Invisibles | ||
| 2012 | Best Documental Film | Listening to Judge Garzón | ||
| 2016 | Best Director | Nobody Wants the Night | ||
| 2016 | Best Film | Nobody Wants the Night | ||
| 2017 | Best Director | The Bookshop | ||
| 2017 | Best Adapted Sreenplay | The Bookshop |
Medals of the :es:Medallas del Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos|Circle of Cinematographic Writers
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 1997 | Best Original Screenplay | Things I Never Told You | ||
| 2003 | Best Adapted Screenplay | My Life Without Me | ||
| 2006 | Best Original Screenplay | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2006 | Best Director | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2017 | Best Director | The Bookshop | ||
| 2017 | Best Adapted Sreenplay | The Bookshop |
:es:Premios Feroz|Feroz Awards
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 2017 | Best Director | The Bookshop | ||
| 2017 | Best Director | The Bookshop | - | - |
:es:Premios Cinematográficos José María Forqué|Forqué Awards
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 2004 | Best Film of the Year | My Life Without Me | ||
| 2006 | Best Film of the Year | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2006 | Best Film of the Year | The Secret Life of Words. | ||
| 2008 | Special EGEDA Award for the Best Documental Feature | Invisibles | ||
| 2016 | Best Feature | Nobody Wants the Night | - | |
| 2017 | Best Director | The Bookshop |
Gaudí Awards
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 2018 | Best Director | The Bookshop | ||
| 2018 | Best Screenplay |
Butaca Awards
| Year | Category | Nominated work | Result | |
| 2003 | Best Catalan Film | My Life Without Me | ||
| 2006 | Best Catalan Film | The Secret Life of Words. |
Other Awards
- :es:Premio Nacional de Cine de Cataluña|National Film and Audiovisual Prize of Catalonia for the film My Life Without Me.
- :es:Creu de Sant Jordi|Premio Creu de Sant Jordi de cine.
- Ojo Crítico de Cine Award in its XIV Edition for the film, My Life Without Me, for the “sincerity and sensitivity of its cinematographic language”.
- Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for his contribution to the world of art and culture
- Atlantida Award from the Catalan Publishers
- Award for the Best Literary Adaptation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2017, for the adapted script of The Bookshop.
- International Award Yo Dona 2018
Books
- My Life Without Me
- La vida es un guión
- La vida secreta de las palabras
- Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio
- Isabel Muñoz
- From I to J
- Alguien debería prohibir los domingos por la tarde
- La vida secreta de Isabel Coixet