The Festival is delighted to announce that the French director Alexandre Aja will be the Guest of Honour of this 18th edition.

Aja will receive an honorary award for his contribution to genre cinema at the opening ceremony on Friday 26 September, and a selective retrospective of his films will be shown throughout the Festival. He will hold a master class on Sunday 28 September and present two films he has chosen for his carte blanche. He will also be on the jury for the International Fantastic Film Competition, which will award the prestigious Golden Octopus at the Festival’s closing ceremony on Saturday 4 October.

Bio:

The son of the director Alexandre Arcady and the critic Marie-Jo Jouan, Alexandre Aja grew up on film sets. At the age of 18, he stepped behind the camera and co-directed the short film Over the Rainbow with Grégory Levasseur, which was selected for competition at Cannes. Two years later, he directed Furia, creating a unique world imbued with anxiety. High Tension confirmed his gripping style and paved the way to Hollywood, where he made a hard-hitting remake of The Hills Have Eyes, produced by Wes Craven, the director of the original version. He then delved into supernatural terror with Mirrors and a fear of murky waters with Piranha 3D and Crawl. He went on to make the fantasy thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax and the poetic fantasy film Horns.

Capable of shifting from an oppressive confined space, as in Oxygen, to large-scale horror spectacles, Aja combines emotional intensity with pure adrenaline. In 2024, he reunited with Halle Berry for Mother Land, a post-apocalyptic survival film. He has also distinguished himself as a producer for other directors, such as Franck Khalfoun (P2 and Maniac), Grégory Levasseur (Pyramid) and Johannes Roberts (The Door). He is currently working on Les Fleurs du mal, a film about Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval, and the highly anticipated Crawl 2, continuing with a career in which each movie pushes the boundaries of the genre.