Ben Wheatley is the standard bearer of a new trend of genre cinema. Born in 1972, he first worked for television (Ideal, The Wrong Door, Modern Toss) as he was getting known through short-films, comics and nutty ads he was uploading on his website. In 2009, he got a lot more attention thanks to his feature film Down Terrace, an intense crime film that reminded us of the Coen's first films' liveliness. Two years after that, he attests his attempt with the enormous Kill List, an uppercut with no equivalent that imposes him as a master among his generation. He does it again the next year, with the violent road-trip movie Tourists ! a crazy reinterpretation of The Honeymoon Killers in the English countryside.

After one of the best segments of the anthology The ABC's of Death and a video clip for the band The Editors in which he pays tributes to Corbucci's Django, he surprises once again with A field in England, a monochromatic trip à la Ken Russel on shrooms in the middle of the English Civil War, distributed simultaneously in theaters, video and on television. Again for television, he directs two episodes of the prestigious series Doctor Who, produces then the lesbian-erotic Duke of Burgundy with his friend Peter Strickland before tackling High Rise, a long-awaited adaptation of a novel by J.G. Ballard. As he is currently shooting his next film Free Fire, a movie about gang wars in the 70s Boston with Cillian Murphy, he comes back the L'Étrange Festival for a carte blanche which reflects his very own universe: essential and surprising.

Born in 1958, Benoit Delepine starts his career in 1980 by founding the ephemeral Fac Off and then by joining the magazine Creation. He then gets in at Canal Plus as co-writer for the News Puppets in 1990, and then by giving birth, in 1992, to Groland's principality and its satirical broadcast. It's there that he creates his character named Michael Kael, a racist, cynical and alcoholic journalist. While continuing his televisual works, he plays his character for Christophe Smith in 1998 for the movie Michael Kael VS the World News Company.

In 2004, he directs with his fellow Grolander Gustave Kervern, Aaltra, a hilarious and corrosive oddity influenced by Aki Kaurismaki (who appears in the movie). Since then, with his alter ego, Benoit Delepine has made several melancholic UFOs with a note of black humor and a thing for outsiders and borderline characters. Avida (2006) payed tribute to surrealist cinema and to Panic Movement whereas Louise Michel (2008), their cutting social comedy, got a prize at Sundance. Two years later, the road-movie Mammuth was a huge public success and in 2012, Le Grand Soir, a punk re-reading of A Monkey in Winter, obtained the Jury Prize in Cannes. In 2014, the two filmmakers surprised the world by shooting with the writer Michel Houellebecq, acting almost on his own for Near Death Experience. Their next film, Saint Amour, a new extravagant story performed by Depardieu, Poelvoorde and Vincent Lacoste isn't out yet so, in the meanwhile, Benoit Delepine does us the honor of selecting an unpredictable Carte Blanche.

Crazy about silent films, the Canadian Guy Maddin directed his first short-film already characteristic of its waking-dream aesthetic, The Dead Father, in 1986, at the age of 30. Two years later, his first feature film, Tales From The Gimli Hospital, proclaimed him as a worthy heir to Lynch and Bunuel, defended by Ben Barenholtz, a dig-up film-lover who discovered Jodorowsky, Romero and the Coen Brothers. Ensue multiple old-fashioned hypnotic works, all obsessed by memories. From the tragic Archangel to the wrecked musical Dracula, Pages From A Virgin's Diary, he keeps searching into the darkest corners of his mind.

In 2003, his film The Saddest Music In The World marks the beginning of his collaboration with the one who'll become his muse: Isabella Rossellini. David Cronenberg, Tom Waits, Martin Scorsese or Todd Haynes still haven't recovered from it. His recognition doesn't keep him from pursuing his marginal works such as his splendid and fascinating trilogy Cowards Bend The Knee, Brand Upon The Brain and in 2007, My Winnipeg, an ode to his hometown, considered by many to be his major work. In 2013, he surprises his fans once more with Spiritisme, a short-film anthology in which he pays tribute to his masters (Hitchcock, Stroheim, Vigo...) and in which each segment was shot in only a day. He comes back this year with huge The Forbidden Room.