In what is still considered by many to be Breillat’s magnum opus, an overweight 12-year-old watches on as an Italian law student courts her beautiful older sister while they vacation in a seaside town, setting into motion a series of abject and disturbing events.

Breillat’s first feature—about the increasingly transgressive sexual awakening of a 14-year-old girl—endures as one of the boldest and most provocative debuts in French cinema after the New Wave.

Breillat’s second feature, about a female filmmaker’s quest to explore her own sexuality through a curious affair with a male filmmaker, furthers Breillat’s project of melding cinema and autofiction to explore the outer limits of desire.

In one of Breillat’s signature films, a precocious and curious 14-year-old on a camping trip with her parents in Biarritz tests the limits of her ability to exert power over men while at the same time growing increasingly anxious to lose her own virginity.

Desire and the law become endlessly entangled in Breillat’s drama about a gruff 50-year-old cop named Georges (Claude Brasseur) who finds himself helping a criminal (Claude-Jean Philippe) whom he has known since they were young and beginning an affair with a colleague’s wife.

An unsettling yet hypnotic portrait of love at its most toxic, Perfect Love chronicles the explosive, protracted demise of a fling and represents Breillat at her most incisive.

Arguably Breillat’s most controversial film to date at the time of its release and one of her signature achievements, Romance follows a school teacher on a harrowing Sadean journey through a misogynistic world fueled by desire and ruled through violence.

Perhaps Breillat’s most autobiographical film finds the director returning to her experience shooting Fat Girl, following a filmmaker’s efforts to direct a sex scene between two actors who can’t stand one another.

A spiritual sequel to Romance, Anatomy of Hell is Breillat at her most stripped-down and elemental and follows a suicidal woman who hires a gay man to spend four days with her exploring the outermost limits of sexuality.

Breillat’s sumptuous adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une vieille maitresse is set in the reign of the “citizen king” Louis Philippe and follows the rivalry between a nobleman’s two loves, his innocent fiancee (Roxane Mesquida) and his Spanish mistress (a forceful Asia Argento).

Breillat’s bloody chamber piece takes an outrageously deadpan approach to Charles Perrault’s grisly bedtime story about the aristocratic ogre who marries and murders a series of wives.

Cursed by a bitter old hag to prick her finger and die on her 16th birthday, a young princess has her sentence reduced by a trio of kindlier witches, instead falling into a deep sleep and remaining there for the next 100 years. Another boldly revisionist fairy tale based on the work of Charles Perrault.

Adapting her own novel, Abuse of Weakness is a hauntingly personal film, starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman who (like Breillat in real life) suffers a serious stroke and is then defrauded by a notorious con man (rapper Kool Shen) whom she casts in a film.

Catherine Breillat proves that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels with her incendiary new drama starring Léa Drucker as Anne, a middle-aged lawyer who inexplicably finds herself sexually drawn to her husband’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo.