Sophie Semin

After studying Law at Université de Paris II and at Institut Français de la Mode, Sophie Semin worked for three years with Designer Yohji Yamamoto. Between 1993 and 1995 she participated in a theatre workshop by Blanche Salant and Paul Weaver. In 1995 she acted in the play Qu’une tranche de pain by Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the Bastille Theatre. Then, she acted in Don Carlos de Verdi, staged by Luc Bondy, and later in plays such as Stella by Goethe and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien by Claudio Abbado and Claude Debussy. In 2007 she was a part of a few reading cycles dedicated to Swiss author Robert Walser. In the following year she read the poems and the correspondence between poets Adonis and Dimitri Analis at the Goethe Institute in Paris. Onscreen, she acted in the film Beyond the Clouds, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, and in the film Le Sacre du Printemps, inspired by Stravinsky’s music and directed by Oliver Herrmann.  Familiar with the works of Peter Handke, whom she married in 1995, Semin returned to the stage in 1999 by the hand of Claus Peymann, acting in the Austrian author’s play Le Voyage en Pirogue, which premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna.  Alongside Jean-Quentin Châtelain, Sophia Semin acted in the play Jusqu’à ce que le Jour Vous Sépare, also by Peter Handke, and delivered the monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. She then returned to the screen in 2016 in a Handke and Wim Wenders collaboration, the film Les beaux jours d’Aranjuez, which will be screened at this edition of LEFFEST.