François Girard

François Girard was born in Quebec in 1963. Best known for his movie writing and directing (Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, The red Violin, Silk...), Girard also directed a number of plays and operas including PARSIFAL at the Metropolitan Opera. He also wrote and directed two Cirque du Soleil shows; Zed and Zarkana. In 1993, his feature film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould would go on to garner international success including four top Genie Awards. Five years later he directed The Red Violin which received an Academy Award for best original score and enshrined Girard as an important player on the international movie scene. The film also won eight Genie Awards and nine Jutra Awards. SILK, which he directed, was adapted from Alessandro Baricco's best-selling book, and was released worldwide in 2007 and received four Jutra Awards. Girard's 1994 concert film Peter Gabriel's Secret World became a best selling film and earned him a Grammy Award. A few years later he directed one of the six episodes of the internationally acclaimed series Yo-yo Ma Inspired by Bach. In 1997, François Girard made his opera directorial debut with Oedipus rex / Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky and Cocteau which received numerous awards and was named by The Guardian "the best theatrical show of the year. Other opera works include Lost Objects for the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Wagner's Siegfried; the Flight of Lindbergh / Seven deadly Sins from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; as well as Kaija Saariaho's Émilie. His most recent opera work is Parsifal which earned him and the Metropolitan Opera Company a remarkable critical success. For the stage, Girard also directed Alessandro Barrico's Novecento; Kafka's Trial and Yasushi Inoue's Hunting Gun. He is currently working on a new production of Waiting for Godot. Girard is a three-time winner of the much-coveted Herald Angel Award for Best Production at the Edinburgh Festival. In recent years, Cirque du Soleil's commissioned Girard to write and direct ZED, their first permanent show in Tokyo; and Zarkana which opened at Radio City Music Hall, played at the Kremlin Theatre and has become a resident show in Las Vegas.