Beginning her career fresh out of prestigious Parisian art school, VFX and animation specialist Magali Barbé worked tirelessly in VFX departments across various SF numbers until her first short, Strange Beasts (2017). Now residing in London, Barbé has continued her work on many big-budget features, working with production company Passion Pictures.

Often, women must labour endlessly in the industry before ever seeing funding for shorts, let alone features- Barbé’s story highlights this. After working as an animator for Avatar (2007), which makes women’s industrial struggles all the more poignant, considering working on the highest grossing film of all time should be door-opening in itself, Barbé quickly moved up into leading entire VFX departments for other big-budget spectacles such as Netflix’s Black Mirror (2011-Present), Avengers : Endgame (2019), and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (2021)- despite her prestige, she has remained uncredited for a few of these titles.

Her two shorts, Strange Beasts (2017) and This Time Away (2019) won her recognition as a director, with This Time Away hitting the Oscar and Bafta longlists in 2020. Unfortunately, in spite of her evident and powerful storytelling capabilities, Barbé is yet to direct her first feature, which really is a shame when her shorts are so utterly brilliant and her CV carries some REALLY weighty experience.