'Don't Kiss Me I'm in Training': an image of Claude Cahun from Lizzie Thynne's film, Playing a Part. Photo: Jess Hooks

A documentary by a University of Sussex film-maker will be screening at a leading contemporary art gallery in Paris.

Lizzie Thynne's 45-minute film Playing a Part, about surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, has been subtitled in French to accompany a major new show of the artist's work.

The exhibition's co-curator, François Leperlier, is the leading French expert on and first biographer of Claude Cahun. "François generously shared his scrupulous research on the artist's life with me during research for the film," says Lizzie, Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Sussex.

Claude Cahun posed in the 1920s and 1930s  for self-portraits while dressed as a woman or man and with her hair short, long or shaven. At once the object and the subject of her artistic experiments, she chose with care the bedspreads, sheets and hangings that appeared in the background, and the masks and capes that she used as props.

Lizzie says: "Cahun's work, long neglected, has been the subject of much interest in the study of visual culture and photography in the two last decades because it chimes so well with contemporary interests in gender and the performance of identity.

"Her work is now much in demand and my film, completed in 2004, continues to be widely used as a resource by curators and visitors as well as by fans, scholars and students."

The show is on display at the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 24 May to 25 September. It will also tour to the Art Institute of Chicago and La Virreina Centre de la imatge, Barcelona.

In addition, Lizzie will present her film in person in March 2012 in Cahun's home town of Nantes, as part of two seasons on 'Le film et l'acte de création: Entre documentaire et oeuvre d'art' ('Film and the creative act: Between documentary and the work of art').