Saga de Xam

Nicolas Devil was born Nicolas Deville in 1943 in French-occupied Vietnam, but moved back to France with his family as a child. In his twenties, he steeped himself in the Parisian countercultural art scene, presiding over a communal studio and partnering with celebrated writers and artists, including Philippe Druillet and the filmmaker Jean Rollin, his best-known collaborator. After having begun Saga de Xam in 1965 as an outline for a science fiction film, Devil and Rollin released the finished story as a comic in 1967 with É ric Losfeld, a Belgian-born publisher known for his commitment to edgy and controversial work. Though he followed the celebrated Saga de Xam with several other works over the next two decades, Devil left France for Quebec in the 1980s, where he became a Green Party activist and philosophy professor.   Jean Rollin (1938– 2010) was a French film director and writer renowned for his work in the low-budget horror and fantastique genres. Rollin's career spanned over five decades and featured work in film, comics, and literature, but he is best known for his genre movies, which including Le viol du vampire (1968), Requiem pour un vampire (1971), and La morte vivante (1982), among many others. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2007, and remains a central figure in the history of cult cinema.