Feature-length films jury – Jérémie Elkaïm
© Thomas Laisné
Biography
Spotted at the age of 17 in Olivier Seror’s short, Un léger différend, Jérémie Elkaim is offered a role in Bed Scenes by François Ozon. Three years later, he plays one of the main character in Sebastien Lifshitz’s Come Undone, that follows an intense love relationship between two boys. Thanks to this film, acclaimed by critics and the audience, the actor makes a name for himself, little by little.
In 2001, he plays a leading role in the comedy Sexy Boys, along with Matthias Van Khache and Julien Baumgartner. After this role of rather well-behaved and orderly boy, he gets back to it in You’ll Get Over It, a drama once more centered on homosexuality. Thereafter, he takes on a series of supporting roles in The Very Merry Widows, Who Killed Bambi ? and The Untouchable.
In 2009, his partner, Valérie Donzelli, offers him not one, but four roles, starting with her first feature Queen of Hearts. This sparkling musical allows him to show the extent of his register. Even once they separated, the couple isn’t done working together, in 2011, they star in Belleville-Tokyo by Elise Girard before adapting to the screen their own story and their little boy’s cancer in Declaration of War. Directed by Valérie Donzelli, the film was shown for the opening of the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, and allows the screenwriter duo to stand out and be awarded the Cabourg Film Festival’s Grand Prix along with the Paris Cinema Festival’s Jury and Bloggers’s Award. At the same time, Jérémie Elkaim is present on the Croisette with the poignant Polisse, the new film by Maïwenn, who received the Jury Prize. In 2012, the romantic comedy Hand in Hand enables him to collaborate with his ex-wife again, through writing on love fusion and starring with Valerie Lemercier.
Jérémie Elkaim then stars in Grand Départ, Nicolas Mercier’s first film in which he plays a young homosexual screenwriter who is compelled to place his father in a specialized institution after discovering his neurodegenerative disease. He also appears in Opium, Ariel Dombasle’s new film who features the dramatic love story between the poet Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet in the early twentieth century.
The year 2015 is very rich for the actor who stars in Indésirables, in which he plays a sexual surrogate for disabled persons. Then, he and Valerie Donzelli return to the Croisette to present to the Official Selection Marguerite & Julien they have both adapted to the screen inspired by the true story of the consuming passion in which Marguerite and Julien de Ravalet have indulged, and that Jean Gruault intended for François Truffaut in 1973.
Jérémie Elkaim slips into the skin of Julien, while the new pearl of French cinema, Anaïs Demoustier, lends her features to Marguerite. In 2016, he lends his voice to Seb, the main character in the 28 episodes of the animated series Salaire net et monde de brutes, broadcasted by Arte, again with Valérie Donzelli and Marianne James; also he plays a disturbing father who kidnaps his two sons in Gilles Marchant’s thriller Into the Forest.
