About the directors

Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet have been making films together for almost 25 years now. Their first major success came with their feature film Amer, which won the New Visions Award at Sitges 2009. The well-rehearsed Belgian directing duo are fully committed to genre film, always paying respect and care to the aesthetic conventions that they take up or skilfully break within their films: In The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013), they take on the giallo, in Let the Corpses Tan (2017), western motifs are woven into a professional killer showdown and in Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025), fans of secret agent films get their money's worth.

Press reviews

„If a picture is worth a thousand words, then every shot in Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s cine-kaleidoscopic Reflection in a Dead Diamond is worth its weight in cubic zirconia. The latest eyegasm from the French couple [...] continues their pop-art worship of guilty-pleasure ’60s cult cinema. This time, their primary inspiration are fumetti neri, the Italian pulp comics that launched the masked Diabolik character and a stylish (if schlocky) subgenre of crime and adventure films — mostly James Bond knockoffs with giallo-vivid visuals.” (Peter Debruge, Variety)

„Their maximalist aesthetic keeps providing such constant hits of dopamine and adrenaline to viewers that it’s difficult to access higher brain functions needed to follow characters and story. But this film provides less a plotline to grab onto so much as it presents a wavelength to ride. [...] Cattet and Forzani create a total cinema within Reflection of a Dead Diamond – not because they manage to replicate reality but because they manage to eradicate it. [...] This is the brain on cinema.“ (Marshall Shaffer, Slant Magazine)

The directors about the film

“It all started when we saw Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere in 2010, starring Fabio Testi. He reminded us of Sean Connery, and was wearing a white suit that reminded us of Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s Death in Venice. That’s when we said to ourselves: “But why not create a universe mixing James Bond with Death in Venice, two antithetical cinemas, and see what happens?” Over the years, the exhibitions we’ve seen, the world we live in, the places we know, etc., have nourished this universe...” (Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet in their press booklet)