Pompidou Centre has retrospective of Egoyan films

One of France's great museums, thePompidou Centre in Paris,is presenting its first retrospective of the Toronto-based director Atom Egoyan.

The retrospective begins Thursday evening with Egoyan and wife Arsinée Khanjian at a screening of the documentary Citadel, which follows Khanjian as she returns to the city of her birth in Lebanon.

Khanjianleft Lebanon as a child when the country was torn apart by civil war and Egoyan's lens captures her returning to Beirut 28 years later on the eve of another war.

Egoyan often explores themes of displacement and alienation in his films, including Ararat, about the killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenian by Ottoman Turks.

Those killingsaffected his own family: Egoyan was born in Egypt of Armenian heritage and grew up in Canada.

The filmmaker has been gaining fans in France since 1985, when he produced and directed his first full-length work, Next of Kin.

At the world renowned Cannes Film Festival, he won the Caméra d'orin 1989 and 1991 for Speaking Parts and The Adjuster. He also competed there with Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey.

The festival at Pompidou Centre, running until June 4, will present all of Egoyan's films from his first shorts to his recent features, such as Where the Truth Lies.

Parisians will have a chance to see some of Egoyan's more experimental films, including Krapp's Last Tape, based on a work by Samuel Beckett, and a collection of early works such as Bolus/Nexus and Open House.

Pompidou Centre has twice focused on the work of another Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg.

According to a report in Parisian newspaper Libération, French filmgoers are interested in works by Quebec filmmakers and that has drawn them to other Canadians, including Egoyan and Winnipeg's Guy Maddin.