Banana Peel

Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.

We follow Marcel Ophuls' two journeys to Sarajevo in 1993. He is starting a documentary about war correspondants. But this also becomes a reflexion about truth and life. The form consists in many interviews of mostly French and American journalists and reporters of television or newspapers.

Love at Twenty unites five directors from five different countries to present their different perspectives on what love really is at the age of 20. The episodes are united with the score of Georges Delerue and still photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Winner of a Best Documentary Academy Award, Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape--with U.S. help--to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.

A famous American secret service agent tries to rescue a German 17 year old prodigy scientist who has been captured by the Russians.

From his childhood in the lowlands of northern France to his death in Nice, a look at the life of painter Matisse: his early education, his apprenticeship at the Beaux-Arts and his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, and draftsman.

Television film

Commissioned by French TV, Yorktown covers the bicentennial commemoration of the Siege of Yorktown, near the end of the American Revolutionary War, where the Americans and their French allies defeated the English. The festivities celebrating Franco-American friendship give Ophüls some amusement, as he takes a gleefully ironic look at the formally “friendly” meeting between Mitterand and Reagan, or exposes the absurdity of patriotic folklore.