Early Life
Denis was born in Paris, France to French natives, and raised in colonial French Africa: Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal and Cameroon, where her father was a civil servant. Her childhood spent living in West Africa with her parents and her younger sister would color her perspectives on certain political issues. It has been a strong influence on her films, which have dealt with themes of colonialism and post-colonialism in Africa. Her father moved with the family every two years because he wanted the children to learn about geography. Growing up in West Africa, Denis used to watch the old and damaged copies of war films sent from the United States. As an adolescent she loved to read. Completing the required material while in school, at night she would sneak her mother's detective stories to read. When Denis was 14 years old, she moved with her mother and sister to a Parisian suburb in France, a country that she hardly knew at all. Her parents wanted their children to finish their education in France.
Read more about this topic: Claire Denis
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)