Ariane Labed

Ariane Labed was born in Athens in 1984 to French parents who worked at a Greek-French school. She lived in Greece until she was six and then grew up abroad, mainly in France. Her name is written Αριάν Λαμπέντ in Greek and is sometimes transliterated as Arian Lampent. At nineteen she began studying theatre at the University of Provence and later completed a master’s degree in dramaturgy and stage practice. With the Greek director Argyro Chioti and Naïma Carbajal she co-founded the theatre company Vasistas, and she has continued to perform with the group.

Her first film part came at about twenty-five, when Athina Rachel Tsangari cast her as Marina in Attenberg. The role won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice in 2010. Greek and international work followed, including Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight and Lucie Borleteau’s Fidelio, l’odyssée d’Alice, which brought her the Best Actress award at Locarno in 2014 and a César nomination. In 2020 she played a lead role in the BBC series Trigonometry.

She has said that she decided on the set of Attenberg that she wanted to direct. Her short film Olla premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2019, and her first feature, September Says, opened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2024. Greek interviews show a lasting connection: in 2020 she offered to give an interview to To Vima in Greek.

Attenberg (2010), written and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari and produced by Haos Film, is in Greek. Marina, aged twenty-three, lives with her father, an architect who is seriously ill, in a planned industrial town by the sea. She finds other people strange and keeps her distance from them. She learns about them through music, David Attenborough’s nature documentaries and lessons from her only friend, Bella, played by Evangelia Randou. When a stranger challenges her to a game of table football, the film follows her first awkward steps towards him. Long, unbroken shots let the audience watch posture, gesture and silence closely, and Labed’s performance carries much of the film through the body as well as words.

Her later roles move between languages. Alps (2011) is another Greek-language film; in The Lobster (2015) she plays a hotel maid in an English-language story; Fidelio, l’odyssée d’Alice (2014) casts her in French as Alice, a ship’s engineer on a freighter. As a director she favours close observation. Olla (2019), a French-British short, follows a woman who answers an online dating advertisement seeking Eastern European women and moves in with a man and his mother. September Says (2024), an English-language European co-production that includes Greece, adapts Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters and follows two sisters, July and September, and their mother. Labed has named Chantal Akerman as a major influence.

In Greece, Labed is remembered above all as Marina in Attenberg, part of a wave of Greek films that won international attention around 2010. Her career also shows how an artist can move between Greek, French and English cinema. Watch a short scene from Attenberg with subtitles, then turn the sound down and describe it yourself in Greek with three present-tense verbs: Η Μαρίνα κοιτάζει, μιλά, παίζει (Marina looks, talks, plays). Add one more action you see. These are our own practice sentences, not lines from the film’s dialogue. Compare your three verbs with a partner’s and notice which actions you both chose.

• She first trained in theatre, not film, at the University of Provence.
• Her very first film role, in Attenberg, won the Volpi Cup at Venice.
• She says she decided to become a director on the set of Attenberg.
• Clips from David Attenborough’s nature programmes appear in Attenberg.