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Icelandic-French filmmaker Solveig Anspach passes away

Icelandic-French movie director Solveig Anspach has died at the age of 54 after losing her battle with breast cancer.

Anspach, who broke onto the scene with her 1999 film Haut les Coeurs, passed away at her Paris home on 7 August. The popular movie told the tale of a woman who had suffered from cancer and was in remission, and was inspired by her own life.

She claimed the best director prize at the Ghent International Film Festival, while lead actress Karin Viard won the Cesar award the same year. The two worked together once more for the 2014 hit movie Lulu in the Nude, which saw Anspach collect her second Cesar nomination earlier in 2015.

Anspach graduated from Paris’s La Femis, after her third enrolment application was finally accepted. Her debut movie was Haut les Coeurs, after which she went on to direct documentaries on the brutalities and hilarities of life. One of her most famous was Vestmannaeyjar, about life in her native island in Iceland, and Made in the USA, centred on Texas’s death penalty, which premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2001.

After completing work on Lulu in the Nude, the director had been working on Aquatic Effect in recent times, the final instalment of her trilogy that looks into life in France and Iceland. The first two films of the trio were Back Soon and Queen of Montreuil in 2008 and 2012 respectively. Aquatic Effect is due to be finished before the end of the year.