
Acting
Joana Preiss
Born
1972-05-22 (54)
Place of birth
Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
Known for
Acting
Credits
52 titles
Joana Preiss (born 22 May 1972) is a French actress, director, singer, and performer. Joana Preiss has starred in the films of Christophe Honoré, Olivier Assayas, Nobuhiro Suwa and Pia Marais, and has also collaborated with Nan Goldin in her works. She has also worked with Ugo Rondinone, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. She has performed on stage in the shows of Pascal Rambert and Eleanor Weber. She was trained in classical singing and contemporary music, and regularly performs in concerts. She founded the duo White Tahina with Vincent Epplay, Hiroyuki, and Frédéric Danos, in which she sings poems by Hölderlin. In 2011 she directed her first film Sibérie. Source…
Known for
6.8Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.
Paris Je T'aime
2006
6.2An American filmmaker faces challenges and self-discovery as she arrives in Paris for Fashion Week on a life-and-death journey.
Couture
2026
4.5After his father's death, a young man is introduced to a world of hedonism and depravity by his amoral mother.
Ma mère
2004
7.0Stringent vegetarian Justine encounters a decadent, merciless, and dangerously seductive world during her first week at veterinary school. Desperate to fit in, she strays from her principles and eats raw meat for the first time. She soon experiences terrible and unexpected consequences as her true self begins to emerge.
Raw
2017
5.7Antoine, a bachelor party-goer, gets new roommates: Jeanne and her two children.
The Full House
2018
6.5Lola is a striking teenaged girl who is on the cusp of adulthood and longs to rush into the adult world of independence, freedom and sexual exploits, but is tenaciously held back by her mother.
LOL (Laughing Out Loud)
2009
Film credits
2020s · 3 titles
6.2An American filmmaker faces challenges and self-discovery as she arrives in Paris for Fashion Week on a life-and-death journey.
Couture
2026
10.0Broken Poet is a compelling investigation into the meaning of success, rock stardom and even freedom itself which, as Janis Joplin sang, is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Broken Poet
2020
4.0Louis II de Barrière has been petrified in the ice since the dawn of time. We find him in a forest, luckily he is alive ! Three witch sisters try to defrost it and unravel its musical mystery. We are propelled with them in a colorful and surreal fairy tale.
Which Is Witch ?
2020
2010s · 22 titles
7.0Stringent vegetarian Justine encounters a decadent, merciless, and dangerously seductive world during her first week at veterinary school. Desperate to fit in, she strays from her principles and eats raw meat for the first time. She soon experiences terrible and unexpected consequences as her true self begins to emerge.
Raw
2017
5.7Antoine, a bachelor party-goer, gets new roommates: Jeanne and her two children.
The Full House
2018
5.1The life and death of the Scottish monarch.
Mary, Queen of Scots
2013
NRPortraits of women, stories from their past and their present as prostitutes working between Italy and France (and Brazil). Women who used to think they were lost, and men just as lost as them.
Jour et nuit, delle donne e degli uomini perduti
2014
5.7A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters. But what he doesn't show to anyone, not even his wife, is the mark on his back that keeps getting bigger. This red mark worries him, upsets him, and seems to want to tell him something...
Portrait of the Artist
2015
NRA couple faces the difficulties of creating a life together and find happiness. Should Suzanne run away from her man to be at peace? Would a new lover help her find herself?
The Man After
2016
NR“Why did you kill her?” Lou asks Philippe again. The life-odyssey of Joana, a modern-day Moll Flanders, continues as she moves through different times and places, like the stations of a personal via crucis, with occasional leaps into the present. From Paris to Rome and on to São Paulo. The body has lost every value, except the economic one.
Hotel de l'Univers
2013
NRA young woman wanders down an endless corridor, while other people knock at a door at night. A man takes a picture of Montmartre, two women hand him some money, while a patron manages from rue de Mhyra a network of Italian call girls. Adiba sings an ancient Moroccan song in a room full of children, while Vidya is performing her daily puja in Pune (India). Giuli sings to herself as she drives at night through Turin and runs to the station at day. Parallel stories where every character is caught “in a situation,” closed.
Home Sweet Home
2012
5.2Louise simultaneously discovers that she is pregnant and that her mother is seriously ill. Happiness and guilt, euphoria and sadness, filial love and love, period. She'll need a good nine months to cope with all this.
Bad Girl
2012
6.0A companion to the director's Le Dos Rouge/Portrait of the Artist. A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters.
Rouge
2015
2.7A scientist finds the secret that predispose to the formation of the ideal couple. With this new alchemy, he achieves a pioneering experience: the creation of a perfect androgynous.
Alien Crystal Palace
2018
5.0Jean, a respected theater actor, leads a dissolute life. Separated from the mother of his child, he devotes most of his time to work, alcohol, and women. Sylvain in full adolescence, feels the need to get closer to his father. On a whim, both of them leave to join an old friend of Jean, Bob the American, who lives on an isolated ranch. From then on, they will try to apprehend each other, with clumsiness, hesitation and sometimes even violence.
The White Line
2010
NROur feelings, our choices, even our death wander on the web like options, like ghosts. For the time of a last train journey, for the time of a love chat, a deadly chat, or an unlikely casting, three generations will try to definitively wrest from virtual nomadism, to put an end to self-exile that undo our lives... Between Rotterdam and Tourcoing, diving in the Flatlands, tenuous and fragile...
Trilogy of Our Lives Undone
2016
2.8Hervé is a lonely man who lives only for his self-defense courses. Fired from the zoo where he works because he depresses the animals, he becomes a night watchman in a factory. To pass the time, he watches the comings and goings of a strange pair of lovers: his colleague and his wife who sells her body with her husband's blessing.
Hip Moves
2012
NRNo synopsis available yet.
La storia di Cino
2014
The film is a rendition of Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last novel. It begins with a reading of the beginning of the first part in Naples, in September 2012. It moves on to Berlin, Locarno 2013, Oneglia, Paris, Casalborgone, and it ends in Milan with the beginning of the second part. The places and times change, and so do the people doing the reading. But also, in the middle, real people and voices surface, like Adamo Vergine at his home and Jean François Neplaz in Marseilles. The film searches for the possible faces of Tolstoy’s two protagonists in Oneglia, Procida, and Casalborgone.
Resurrection
2019
6.0Fall into the world of Felix Kubin's experimentation and creation of music sound and his mastering of his instrument of predilection, the KORG MS20. A portrait of a great artist who never stops living with music in his head.
Felix in Wonderland
2019
4.5Filmed entirely by Preiss and her then lover, Dumont, mostly in the claustrophobia of a train car on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Siberia is an intense and raw observation of a relationship’s denouement. With unflinching honesty and a Direct Cinema approach, Preiss’s documentary is a fascinating psychological exploration of love, dependency, and the bounds of romantic privacy.
Sibérie
2012
2.7Over there, in his village at the foot of the mountains, he’s dead. His face radiant and his body at peace, he lies on the bed. Then they can gather around him. Three days long they talk, drink, weep, fight and remember… And they smile, too.
The Wake
2018
The French Trilogy showcases a series of 62 photographs taken by Philippe Terrier-Hermann with 25 actors in 6 French regions echoing his previous project, The American Tetralogy. Questioning the relationship between cinema, landscapes and representations, this project features a song by Edward Barrow and was visible in public space in France during the summer of 2013, through a distribution system borrowing from advertising strategies.
The French Trilogy
2013
5.0A gas station. Two women. Winter. Trips. Daily life. And then a risk. The hotel in Normandy. A step aside. The investigation. The red Lada. The beach. The death that works the living. A movement and a suspension. The brown girl. The love. A story of links that are woven.
Passer l'hiver
2014
NRA film director interviews Burmese refugees about their experiences encountering oppression and cruelty in their homeland, and reads aloud poetry about the destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bomb.
Silent Asylum
2013
2000s · 17 titles
6.8Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.
Paris Je T'aime
2006
6.8Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.
Paris Je T'aime
2006
4.5After his father's death, a young man is introduced to a world of hedonism and depravity by his amoral mother.
Ma mère
2004
6.5Lola is a striking teenaged girl who is on the cusp of adulthood and longs to rush into the adult world of independence, freedom and sexual exploits, but is tenaciously held back by her mother.
LOL (Laughing Out Loud)
2009
6.4After she ends up in prison and loses custody of her son, a woman struggles to assimilate outside her former life and remain clean long enough to regain custody of her son.
Clean
2004
5.0A beautiful woman, Sandra, seduces a wealthy businessman, Miles Rennburg. Little does he realise that she has been sent to kill him at the behest of her boyfriend/crime partner, Lester. Controlling all this is Sue, Lester's wife.
Boarding Gate
2007
5.9After a love affair ends badly, a young Parisian named Paul sinks into the same kind of deep depression that led his sister to kill herself. He moves back home with his father and aimless brother Jonathan but refuses to get out of bed.
In Paris
2006
6.1When 21 year-old Leo, the oldest of four brothers, announces to his rural French family that he's HIV positive, his family quickly rallies around him. Leo travels to Paris with his youngst brother Marcel for treatment. When Leo tries to push his brother away to protect him, the love and loyalty of the two brothers is tested.
Close to Leo
2002
5.5Two police detectives investigate the murder of a high-end male prostitute, and his relationship with his girlfriend.
Accomplices
2009
5.5A French couple has been living in Lisbon for years, and they return to Paris for a friend's wedding. They announce to another friend they are having dinner with that they are going to split.
A Perfect Couple
2006
5.5In Paris, in 1943, Jules, a 19-year-old Jew, lived without an ideal, tossed about by circumstances. He becomes in turn a traitor then a hero. Thomas, his fifteen-year-old brother, wants to act and fight in resistance.
The War in Paris
2002
5.9Stevie, a precocious 14-year-old girl must cope with the instabilities of her immoderate parents. When they decide to move to a small provincial town in Germany, Stevie attempts to slip into a normal life. Whilst her parents playfully escape their responsibilities, Stevie tries to make a good impression in town, spreading stories of grandeur and claiming to be the daughter of a diplomat. She makes progress. Yet the good weather doesn’t last and before long, she discovers that her parents have once more resorted to illegal means, as a way of supporting their leisurely lifestyle. As friends and hangers-on of her parents fill their new home, the chaos continually mounts. It is in this atmosphere of physical and emotional destruction, that Stevie must now start to define herself and perhaps even break free.
The Unpolished
2007
4.5Footage from 2005’s Festival Art Rock in Saint-Brieuc, France, featuring Metric, Sonic Youth, Jeanne Balibar, and other acts.
Noise
2006
10.0It is the story of a prohibited and perverted identification: how an eight-year-old boy, entrusted to the care of his mother since the separation of the parents, meets and looks at his father, all day long.
La nuit sera longue
2003
NRSet over the course of a one night stand, a woman comes to question the destructive nature of her routine night time behaviour
High
2009
No synopsis available yet.
Quartier des Enfants-Rouges
2006
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Roundelay
2002
1990s · 1 titles
Undated · 1 titles
Series credits
Behind the camera
NRA collaborative project consisting four young generation of Taiwan directors, and four young foreign directors from Chile, France, Iran, and South Korea.Without being acquainted previously before meeting each other in Taipei, the eight of them shared their life experiences, and then co-wrote and co-directed four short films based on impressions and imaginations of a city.
Taipei Factory
2013
NRA collaborative project consisting four young generation of Taiwan directors, and four young foreign directors from Chile, France, Iran, and South Korea.Without being acquainted previously before meeting each other in Taipei, the eight of them shared their life experiences, and then co-wrote and co-directed four short films based on impressions and imaginations of a city.
Taipei Factory
2013
4.5Filmed entirely by Preiss and her then lover, Dumont, mostly in the claustrophobia of a train car on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Siberia is an intense and raw observation of a relationship’s denouement. With unflinching honesty and a Direct Cinema approach, Preiss’s documentary is a fascinating psychological exploration of love, dependency, and the bounds of romantic privacy.
Sibérie
2012
In New York to present her film Siberia, Joana Preiss documents the city through its pace and meetings. We are wrapped in a mysterious journey through her imagination, which is both breathtaking and hypnotic.
Lands Close to Paterson
2013
No synopsis available yet.
El Pajarito & Marseille
2018
NR14Reels is a collective film in Super 8, where 14 directors in 14 cities around the world have filmed and edited in camera one reel each on the theme of the city.
14Reels
2016
NRA film director interviews Burmese refugees about their experiences encountering oppression and cruelty in their homeland, and reads aloud poetry about the destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bomb.
Silent Asylum
2013



