On the latest episode of FLC Luminaries, our video series that spotlights talent at all levels of the filmmaking process who uplift the art and craft of cinema, The Stranger director François Ozon discusses his sensitive, queer-inflected, César-winning film.

The opening night selection of the 2026 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, The Stranger is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Music Box Films. Get tickets!

After teaming with Benjamin Voisin for the actor’s breakout role in Summer of 85, François Ozon reunites with that film’s star and a cast that includes Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud, and Denis Lavant for a bold new envisioning of Albert Camus’s novel. In a part previously played by Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation, Voisin definitively embodies Meursault, the tightly coiled center of a narrative that recounts a murder in Algiers under French colonial rule. While staying faithful to the chilly, fascinating darkness of Camus’s existential classic, Ozon also gives new life to the canonical text, not least by bringing Algeria to the thematic and visual foreground in this adaptation. Shooting in starkly blown-out black and white that suggests the oppressive heat of Meursault’s surroundings, Ozon’s reading of Camus’s classic rises to the challenge with appropriately enigmatic elegance.