Sophie Barthes

Born in France, filmmaker Sophie Barthes had something of a global upbringing, growing up in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. She moved to New York in 2000 to attend the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she graduated in 2003. By the next year, Barthes was co-directing the short film "Snowblink" (2004) with her husband, cinematographer Andrij Parekh. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, and set the stage for Barthes to helm the short film "Happiness" (2006), which won the Showtime Tony Cox Award for Best Screenplay in a short film. The short film also earned Barthes a spot in the Sundance Institute's Writer's Lab. While there, she developed a script based on an odd dream she'd had in which filmmaker Woody Allen was having his soul removed. The dream soon transformed into the script for the movie "Cold Souls" (2009), which Barthes directed in 2009 with Paul Giamatti in the leading role. Two more short films would follow for Barthes, "La Muse" (2012) and "Hopper Stories" (2012), before she got to work on her next feature, the period film "Madame Bovary" (2014), based on the classic novel by Gustave Flaubert, which took two years to develop.