Franca Maï(1959-2012)

Endowed with a mysterious, elegant, slightly enigmatic beauty, Paris-born Franca Mai has a quarter of Vietnamese blood running in her veins. With such an asset, Franca could have become a star of the French and - why not - the international cinema. Unfortunately her career amounts to only a pair of roles, the first she played, one of the two lesbian vampire women of Jean Rollin's best film "Fascination" (1979), being the most satisfying. She was then seen sporadically in the shoes of a reporter in "Zig Zag Story" (1983), of a terrorist in "Le moustachu" with Jean Rochefort (1987) or of the "poetic" prostitute in Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe's excellent TV movie "Les idiots" (1987). And that is about all. To make matters worse these roles were short and sometimes almost entirely deleted like in "Zig Zag Story". For sure, If Franca Mai's contribution to art had been limited to those few appearances it could be called insignificant. But Franca Mai is a hyperactive woman who can't content herself with so little and who likes expressing herself in various manners. She is also a singer, a photographer, the co-editor of the web magazine e.torpedo.net and an independent filmmaker and producer. Wearing these two hats, she made a series of alternative underground shorts. Now, she has found her most successful means of expression: literature. Franca has indeed written no fewer than seven novels between 2002 and 2009, from "Momo qui kills" (2002) to "Crescendo" (2009), all of which having been acclaimed by French critics. They all praise her vitriolic style, the indignant expression of her empathy for the destitute and the outcasts, her dark desperate romanticism. Her art now makes her one of her kind in the polished realm of French literature.