Biography
Henri Colpi was a Swiss-born French film editor and director. He graduated from the IDHEC in 1947 and worked as an editor on numerous films during the 1950s and 1960s, including Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961).
As a director, Colpi is best known for Une aussi longue absence (1961; also known as The Long Absence), written by Marguerite Duras, which shared the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival and won the Louis Delluc Prize the previous year. His second feature, Codine (1963), screened in competition at Cannes, where he received the prize for best screenplay. He continued to edit and direct into the 1990s, including restoring André Antoine's L'Hirondelle et la Mésange (premiered 1984).
