Winner of both the prestigious César Award for Best Film and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Picture in 2017, Saïd Ben Saïd, according to Ion Cinema, “has risen to prominence with his carefully groomed crop of rule breaking auteurs,” including Brian De Palma (Passion), Paul Verhoeven (Elle), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (A Castle in Italy), Phillippe Garrel (In the Shadow of Women), David Cronenberg (Maps to the Stars), Roman Polanski (Carnage), and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius).

In 2017, Saïd Ben Saïd began producing Synonymous, a Paris-set film by Nadiv Lapid, “the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory and perhaps ever,” according to J. Hoberman, a Table Magazine columnist and former longtime Village Voice film critic. Ben Saïd also served on the jury of the Israeli Feature Competition at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

For these “crimes”—working with an Israeli director and judging films at a film festival in the Jewish State—Ben Saïd’s invitation to serve as presiding judge of Tunisia’s 28th Carthage Film Festival was rescinded. His response, published in Le Monde, thanked the organizers for “spar[ing] both myself and themselves a media lynching campaign. This regrettable incident put in me in a situation where I found myself opposite people I had no desire to offend and reveals the current debate about a country whose name in Tunisia has become unutterable.”

Saïd Ben Saïd’s films have won hundreds of international awards, are regularly screened at the Venice, Berlin, and other world-class film festivals, and, since first appearing at the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight in 2011, have been entered in the main competition each year (2013-2017) in recognition of his signature approach to “find coherence and unity in the defense of a cinema that is both demanding and accessible.”