Cuban director, screenwriter and film editor based in Madrid, Spain. He comes to cinema from video art and a recognized work as a creator of music videos and promotional shorts. With the film Tres veces dos, in which he wrote and directed one of the three stories that compose it, he was awarded the Silver Zenith for best first film at the Montreal Film Festival.Her first solo feature film, La Edad de la peseta, an Oscar nominee and Goya nominee for best Ibero-American film, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won awards at numerous festivals around the world. The University of Houston included it, along with seven other Hispanic films by Buñuel, Almodóvar, Erice and Cuerda, in the Modern and Classical Languages program. Spanish Films. In 2020 the Cinemateca de Cuba chose it among the ten films with the best cinematography and art direction in the history of Cuban cinema.
Her next film, Omertà, won the Coral Award in the category of best unpublished screenplay at the Havana International Film Festival and premiered the following year in San Sebastian.In 2014 he co-directed the documentary film Playing Lecuona, starring pianists Chucho Valdés, Michel Camilo and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, accompanied by Ana Belén, Raymundo Amador, Omara Portuondo and other notable musicians. The film won awards at the Montreal Film Festival as best documentary and at the New York International Film Festival, where it received the Merit Award.
El Acompañante, released in the United States by HBO in 2016, after an extensive tour of festivals around the world, was its second Oscar nomination. It was previously recognized as Best Project at the 61st San Sebastian Film Festival and with the SGAE Julio Alejandro Award for Best Ibero-American Screenplay. It was nominated for the Platino Awards for best screenplay and the Forqué Awards for best Latin American film of the year. It also won the Audience Award in Miami, Toulouse, Malaga and Havana (2nd prize) and Best Screenplay at HFF in New York, where the then Brooklyn Borough President, Eric Adams, recognized it for "the good use of cinema as a social tool".
His most recent feature documentary, El caso Padilla, was presented at the end of 2022 at the Telluride Film Festival and had its European premiere in San Sebastian. It has also been presented at the Rome Film Festival, the Miami International Film Festival (Best Documentary Award), IFF Panama and Cineuropa, where it won the Audience Award. It has a long route of festivals planned before its commercial release in theaters in Spain.
In 2022, his novel Habana Nostra was a finalist for the Azorin Award. Giroud is currently developing three series: Partagás, The Sugar King and Ayloviu Havana, as well as the feature film El soldado perfecto.