Walerian Borowczyk was a Polish film director described by film critics as a "genius who also happened to be a pornographer". He directed 40 films between 1946 and 1988. Borowczyk settled in Paris in 1959. As a film director, he worked mainly in France.

Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983). Marker is usually associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.