Lest We Forget
Contre l'Oubli (Against Oblivion) is a compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.
Costa-Gavras
Bernard Giraudeau
Jean-Luc Godard
Michel Piccoli
Romain Goupil
Claire Denis
Alain Resnais
Jane Birkin
Bertrand Tavernier
Patrice Chéreau
Francis Girod
Bertrand Blier
Coline Serreau
Alain Corneau
Patrice Leconte
Jean Becker
Michel Deville
Jacques Deray
Raymond Depardon
Philippe Muyl
Anne-Marie Miéville
Robert Kramer
Jacques Doillon
Chantal Akerman
Jean-Loup Hubert
Jean-Michel Carré
Gérard Frot-Coutaz
René Allio
Nadine Trintignant
Denis Amar
Dominique Dante
Sarah Moon
Martine Franck
Casts & Crew
Paul Amar
Robert Badinter
Guy Bedos
Jane Birkin
Carole Bouquet
Emmanuelle Béart
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Claude Cheysson
Catherine Deneuve
Alex Descas
Anny Duperey
Sami Frey
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Anouk Grinberg
L'Abbé Pierre
Jacques Higelin
Isabelle Huppert
François Jacob
Bruno Masure
Alexandre Minkowski
Edgar Morin
Youssou N'Dour
Philippe Noiret
Michel Piccoli
Hubert Reeves
André Rousselet
Sai Sai
MC Solaar
Alain Souchon
Bernard Stasi
Haroun Tazieff
Gérald Thomassin
Marie Trintignant
Martine Franck
Also Directed by Costa-Gavras
The head of a giant European investment bank desperately clings to power when an American hedge fund company tries to buy them out.
In this cynical comedy, an renowned, out-of-work, unpublished "underground" writer from formerly Communist Poland is driven to unusually desperate measures in order to get his work published. Stan (Jiri Menzel) has been living in the attic apartment of his ex-wife's home, which he shares with a journalist friend (Andre Dussolier). One day, he has an accident which convinces his ex-wife and her current husband (Anna Romantowska and Pierre Arditi) that he's suicidal, and they hastily contact a media representative to see if some sort of publicity can't be arranged so that Stan's work can be published and they can benefit, if not from the money, then from their association with him. The organization they contact says that they will be happy to publish his writings, if he will commit suicide live, on television, in St. Peter's square, while the Pope is delivering an address.
Thirteen filmmakers talk about Henri Langlois and their relationship with him.
The vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia, knowing he's being watched and followed, is one day arrested and put into solitary confinement by his blackmailers.
Using the interrogation of a US counterinsurgency agent as a backdrop, the film explores the consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas.
Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is horrified by what he sees in the death camps. he is then shocked to learn that the process he used to purify water for his troops by using Zyklon-B, is now used to kill people in gas chambers.
A misguided museum guard who loses his job and then tries to get it back at gunpoint is thrown into the fierce world of ratings-driven TV gone mad.
Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.
A chemist loses his job to outsourcing. Two years later and still jobless, he hits on a solution: to genuinely eliminate his competition.
An FBI agent (Debra Winger) falls in love with a white supremacist (Tom Berenger) whose group she infiltrates.
Also Directed by Bernard Giraudeau
Nobleman Jean-Francois de la Plaine is exiled to serve as governor of a West African colony.
A man who survives an earthquake is convinced that there is another man still stuck in the debris.
Also Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard addresses two filmic letters to young Israeli soldiers who were sentenced after refusing to intervene in the occupied territories.
TV commercial (commissioned by Swiss tobacco company F.J. Burrus S.A.) for Parisienne cigarettes.
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.
For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while slaughters like the one in Bosnia are taking place, and he throws in a strong critique of the European Union. For Ever Mozart is one of Godard's most disjointed and difficult films. Its stories sometimes seem to form a whole and at other times the links among them are unclear. One gets the impression that in each episode Godard attempts to start a film only to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue. It features some of the most beautiful shots of tanks in the cinema.
A reworking of extracts from Andre Malraux, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, and GK Chesterton.
Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.
Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films
The official spot of 22nd Jihlava international documentary film festival, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Also Directed by Michel Piccoli
Respected French actor Michel Piccoli directed and co-wrote this allegorical drama. A (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is a veteran political activist in an unnamed country with a long history of human rights abuses. When the nation's dictatorial government is overthrown and a new democratic leadership comes into power, A's wife Sylvie (Dominique Blanc), who was born in France, travels to Paris to work on an article about the nation's new political freedoms. But A soon discovers that the changes have not been as dramatic as he imagined after Sylvie is told she will not be allowed back into the country. A and his daughter Joyce (Jade Fortineau) wait out Sylvie's immigration problem at his family's seaside vacation home, but while he and his friends have long been subject to political harassment, A discovers that the new regime's tactics have a far more dangerous undertow, with executions of radicals suddenly becoming commonplace.
Un homme partage sa vie entre l'appartement qu'il habite avec sa femme, celui qu'il occupe avec son maîtresse, et son club. Avec la complicité de sa domestique, il dépouille l'une pour faire des cadeaux à l'autre. A l'une, il n'offre que des parties de Scrabble jouées dans le silence, à l'autre, déclarations et bouquets de fleurs quotidiens.
A trucker, an accountant, a former plumber hospitalised after a suicide attempt... Presided over by the accountant, the three families decide to buy a truck, a trucker's dream. The father, practical joker, and larger-than-life lover, keeps a watchful eye. The children are his accomplices. One is his heroine. His daughter is his other heroine. A puzzle of life's desires in which all veers into the imaginary, into dreams of far-off lands.
Also Directed by Romain Goupil
No overview found
Gustave Courbet defied the conventions of classical French painting to become an innovator of Realism. This documentary by filmmaker Romain Goupil explores Courbet's life and work, revealing the fiery spirit that drove him to lead rather than follow.
Fifty years after the events of May 68, Dany Cohn-Bendit and Romain Goupil have decided to start a journey across France. In this "road movie" they explore the territories - at times bewildering - of the Republic. Observing, listening, debating, discovering the state of the country. Its crises and its hopes. Its ordinary heroes, its gravediggers, its innovators...ON THE ROAD IN FRANCE or the tour and detours in France of two old children of 68.
March 22, 2067. At dawn of life, Milana remembers her life, when she was a young Chechen immigrant in Paris, struggling for a better life along with her school friends.
Michel Recanati was a militant leader in the May, 1968 riots in Paris, organizing many groups to meet, discuss, and act on leftist principles both before and after the disturbances. He was imprisoned for a short while in 1973. Disillusioned after the failure of the demonstrations and the death of the only woman he had loved, his life seems to have changed from a period of hope and activism to one of bottomless despair. His friend, Romain Goupil wrote and directed this biographical documentary. Death at 30 received the 1982 Cannes Film Festival's Golden Camera Award for "Best First Feature-Length Film."
Yakine, bright student with algerian origins, wears the hijab. Her family and her school want to understand but she refuses to talk about it.
Also Directed by Claire Denis
In 2014, artist Olafur Eliasson and filmmaker Claire Denis connected for the first time to explore and discuss their common fascination with phenomena that have not yet been fully explained by science – such as black holes – and their shared interest in abstraction. This short film by Denis, contemplating tests for Eliasson's work ‘Contact’, is one outcome of that conversation which would eventually lead to their collaboration on Denis's film High Life (2018), in which Eliasson designed the light installations at the films end.
One of a series of short films inspired by paintings. In this video, Jacques de Loustal's Le Contemplatif or "Duo".
An emotionally cold man leaves the safety of his Alpine home to seek a heart transplant and an estranged son.
Claire Denis goes to Eastern Chad to the Breidjing camp, the home of 40,000 refugees from Darfur. With great humility, she tells the stories of these men and women, victims of one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes that this century has seen so far.
Monte and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to the outer reaches of the solar system. They must now rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Set in 1984 during the Nicaraguan Revolution, the film follows a mysterious English businessman and headstrong American journalist who strike up a passionate romance. They soon become embroiled in a dangerous labyrinth of lies and conspiracies and are forced to try and escape the country, with only each other to trust and rely on.
Short documentary about an archetypal library concept for kids in Clamart.
He is an Aluku man, one of the five tribes of Maroons who survives in the forest during 400 years after escaping from the Dutch sugarcane plantations. All the Maroons are issued originally from the West coast of Africa. They were taken as slaves.
Paris, 1995. Laure is about to meet friends for dinner. But on her way out, she discovers that the entire city is stalled by a massive transit strike. When a handsome stranger offers her a ride, Laure takes a highly charged, impossibly erotic detour.
Also Directed by Alain Resnais
Documentary about George Gershwin directed by Alain Resnais with various celebrities speaking on their admiration and affection for Gershwin's music.
In Paris, six people all look for love, despite typically having their romantic aspirations dashed at every turn.
Odile is a business executive looking for a new, bigger apartment. Her younger sister Camille has just completed her doctoral thesis in history and is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours because he's attracted to her. Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.
Directed by Alain Resnais
In seven different parts, Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamees army during the Vietnam-war.
Recovering from an attempted suicide, a man is selected to participate in a time travel experiment that has only been tested on mice. A malfunction in the experiment causes the man to experience moments from his past in a random order.
A chamber drama about a widow and her son who live in an antique shop in Boulogne. The widow invites a man whom she loved twenty-two years earlier to visit. Her son is haunted by Muriel, a young woman whose death he may have caused while serving as a soldier in Algeria. As in Resnais' earlier films, memory is deflected, fragmented, enshrined, and imagined.
In the midst of rehearsals for a new play, amateur dramatics proponents Colin and Kathryn receive the shattering news that their friend George is fatally ill and only has a few months to live.
Le chant du Styrène is a 1958 French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.
Irresistible charm and talent helps Serge Alexandre alias Stavisky, small-time swindler, to make friends with even most influential members of French industrial and political elite during the early 30s. But nothing lasts forever and when his great scam involving hundreds millions of francs gets exposed result is an unprecedented scandal that almost caused a civil war.
Also Directed by Jane Birkin
Anna, 50 years old, moves into her new house. Rooms are full of boxes which contain a lot of things and plenty of memories. Anna has lived many lives and her past comes out of these boxes. Her parents surely, but also her children and their fathers, the living and the dead. In this breakneck period of her life, time is running faster and faster and Anna takes a run-up to face the past and try to go towards the future. And, maybe, to manage to still believe in love?
Also Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
Documentary on the French-Algerian conflict 1954-1962 which was never officially called a "war", including interviews with some of the survivors.
The story of a young couple, Pierre and Geraldine, and their desire for a child, which leads them on a journey of initiation to Cambodia. On their difficult and transformative adventure, they must contend with obstructive authorities and the jealousies and mistrust of a small community of would-be adoptive parents.
January, 1920. 350,000 French soldiers remain missing in action. Major Dellaplane tirelessly matches the dead and the wounded with families' descriptions. Honor and ethics drive him; he hates the idea of "the unknown soldier." Into his sector, looking for her husband, comes a haughty, politically connected Parisian, Madame Irène de Courtil. Brusquely, Dellaplane offers her 1/350,000th of his time, but as their paths cross and she sees his courage and resolve, feelings change. After he finds a surprising connection between her missing husband and a local teacher, Irène makes Dellaplane an offer. This man of action hesitates: has he missed his only chance?
France, 1893. Joseph Bouvier attempts to shoot his love who refused to marry him and to commit suicide. Upon release from the filthy asylum where he was placed, with bullets still remaining in his head, he wanders the country roads and rapes and murders many teenagers over years. The judge Rousseau captures him, but to serve his ambition seeks to avoid that Bouvier is simply declared insane.
No overview found
Famous French director Tavernier tells us about his fantastic voyage through the cinema of his country.
Alexandre Taillard de Vorms is a force to be reckoned with. With his silver mane and tanned, athletic body, he stalks the world stage as Minister of Foreign Affairs for France, waging his own war backed up by the holy trinity of diplomatic concepts: legitimacy, lucidity, and efficacy. Enter Arthur Vlaminck. Hired to write the minister's speeches, Arthur must contend with the sensibilities of his boss and the dirty dealings within the Quai d'Orsay, the ministry's home.
The film is about the French film industry from 1942 to 1944 during the Nazi occupation. The film focuses on assistant director and resistance fighter Jean Devaivre and screenwriter Jean Aurenche. Aurenche is on the move so that he doesn't have to write anything collaborationist. Devaivre is in dangerous political activity. Devaivre also works for the German production company Continental where he is respected. On the other hand, Aurenche's scriptwriting doesn't help how he lives and he is a womanizer which causes him to procrastinate.
The last days of World War I, Eastern front. Captain Conan, a lone wolf, a true warrior, leads a band of ruthless French fighters who love hand-to-hand combat; they are not fit for peacetime, they only feel really alive in the chaos of the battlefield.
Also Directed by Patrice Chéreau
Friends of painter Jean-Baptiste Emmerich gather at a Paris railroad station for a four-hour journey to Limoges, where Emmerich wanted to be buried. The dozen travelers include art historian François and his lover Louis, who develops an interest in teenage Bruno. Traveling parallel with the train is a station wagon with Jean-Baptiste's body, and this vehicle is driven by Thierry, husband of Catherine, who's on the train with their daughter. François plays a taped interview with Jean-Baptiste, revealing his sexual appeal to both men and women. Lucie is convinced that she was his main love. Also on board is his nephew, Jean-Marie and Jean-Marie's estranged wife Claire. After the funeral in "Europe's largest cemetery," the story continues in the mansion of Jean-Baptiste's brother Lucien.
Henri is a lonely, isolated young man who lets no one get close to him. He meets a street hustler and comes out of his shell, going 180 degrees into gay obsession. Though he has yet to physically approach the object of his affection, Henri builds up so much unrequited lust that it explodes with horrible results.
A seemingly ideal marriage is thrown into embarrassing turmoil in Patrice Chéreau's period drama, based on the short story The Return by Joseph Conrad.
The solitary Daniel and Sonia share an uneasy love/hate relationship. Daniel's life is disrupted by the appearance of a stranger that proceeds to insinuate himself in his life. The man's persistence takes its toll on Daniel and Sonia, leaving Daniel alone with nagging questions of "Why?"
When her old resistance buddies come to her looking for someone to helm a financially troubled liberal newspaper, Judith (Simone Signoret) is at first reluctant, but for this old hero of the French anti-Nazi resistance, challenges are hard to ignore. She takes on the job, mortgaging her house to keep the paper solvent. When things take a turn for the worse, because of concerted opposition by conservative forces, she is forced to sell the paper, and she regards this as a personal failure.
No overview found.
Jay, a failed musician, walked out of his family and now earns a living as head bartender in a trendy London pub. Every Wednesday afternoon a woman comes to his house for graphic, almost wordless, sex. One day Jay follows her and finds out about the rest of her life (and that her name is Claire). This eventually disrupts their relationship.
Thomas has been estranged from his brother Luc for several years, due in part to his difficulties in dealing with Luc's homosexuality. But when Thomas is diagnosed with a rare blood disease, which is difficult to treat and impossible to cure, he decides he wants to bring Luc back into his life. The brothers soon become inseparable, and their new relationship begins to alienate their significant others.
The night of August 24, 1572, is known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In France a religious war is raging. In order to impose peace a forced wedding is arranged between Margot de Valois, sister of the immature Catholic King Charles IX, and the Hugenot King Henri of Navarre. Catherine of Medici maintains her behind-the-scenes power by ordering assaults, poisonings, and instigations to incest.
Also Directed by Francis Girod
The marriage of the famous writer Alan and his young wife Lola is in a crisis. On a vacation in Haiti Lola wants to decide if their relationship still has a future...
The plot in this story weaves around like a New Year's reveler at four in the morning, heading first in one direction and then in another, with the intention of going home if things would just stop moving. Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) is a doctor whose Hippocratic oath was a hypocritic failure -- the not-so-good doctor kills his wife because she is having an affair, and he kills her lover too. Then he joins the French Foreign Legion. On his way to the former French colonies in Africa, the plane he is in crashes, and Rossi, a "friend" on the plane with some overweight in carry-on money, shoots Bernard and takes off, leaving him for dead. He is nursed back to life and health by friendly villagers and just his luck, he not only manages to make his fortune in Africa, he also nabs a French passport from a dying man who will clearly not need it anymore unless the Pearly Gates have a French guard.
Documentary about the making of French director Claude Chabrol's first film Le Beau Serge in 1958.
The scene is the restless Paris of the interwar years where an attractive and ambitious woman successfully makes her way in a world previously reserved for men: that of high finance. Originating from a humble background, she quickly becomes popular with small savers by offering them outstanding interest rates. Extremely popular, she makes no secret of her taste for the good things in life and her homosexual affairs. They will cost her dearly...
Just before taking an irrevocable and tragic step, Caroline talks to Claire, her lycée friend. Later, Claire gathers five other school friends, and tells them Caroline's secret. The six agree to wage a guerrilla war against their philosophy teacher, the sarcastic and belittling M. Terrien, the cause of Caroline's despair. After seeking advice from Mayard, the school's guidance counselor and a leftist with a police record, the six look for evidence that could get Terrien fired. They strike gold, and then raise the stakes. Sarah, one of the six, hatches a deadly plan.
French drama starring Caroline Cellier, Claude Brasseur and Niels Arestrup
40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. The results run the gamut from Zhang Yimou's convention-thwarting joke to David Lynch's bizarre miniature epic.
Claire's handbag is stolen. It contained a letter written ten years previously by the man who is now the French President. In the letter he urges his pregnant mistress to have an abortion. Claire immediately alerts the President's men. From that moment, the machinery of state swings into action.
On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.
Also Directed by Bertrand Blier
A father arrives at his son's house one evening. They begin talking about women, love, relationships and things turn awkward fast.
After winning the lottery, François goes to a bar in Pigalle and offers one hundred thousand Euros per month to a prostitute named Daniela to live with him as his wife until his money runs out.
An alcoholic writer is visited by an incarnation of his cancer.
Camille, a naive schoolgirl meets an intriguing influence in Joelle, a slightly older and much more experienced spirit. Camille follows her new friend through the discovery of sex and the darker side of life. As the film progresses, Camille discovers AIDS and the fear that she may have picked up the disease in her early encounters.
Menage begins as a comedy of sorts, but be warned: it develops into a very dark, very confusing probe into the seamier aspects of Parisian life. Gerard Depardieu plays a crude but charismatic thief, whose own gayness does not prevent his commiserating with those of the opposite sex. Miou-Miou and Michel Blanc are young, impoverished lovers who fall under Depardieu's influence. He gains their confidence by introducing them to kinky sex, then sucks them into a vortex of crime. Director Bertrand Blier, who in most of his films has explored the awesome power (rather than pleasure) of sex, nearly outdoes himself in Menage (aka Tenue de Soiree).
A car dealer, well-to-do and with a beautiful wife, finds himself attracted to his rather plain new temporary secretary. Despite her own commitments she feels the same and the two soon embark on an affair. Though it would seem it has happened before his wife finds this particular entanglement of her husband's very difficult to accept.
Les Acteurs is the absurd story of Jean-Pierre Marielle desperately waiting for a cup of hot water, the story of a conspiracy against actors, the story of aging actors whose careers are slowly less active than they used to be, but a stunning tribute to French actors and their cinema.
This is the story of a guy who goes too fast and a big guy who is too slow. Foster meets Taupin. All this would be trivial if one of them had a scary scenario, the scenario of their lives and their deaths. Just open the pages and shake.
Two men, fortyish, worn out by their wives, abandon everything to go and live in the back of beyond. There they meet a truculent priest, a boozer, Émile who recalls them to life's simple pleasures. Calm is what they want. But soon their example inspires thousands of disorientated males, fleeing the feminist 1970s. Soon, too, there arrives a squadron of nymphomaniac Amazons.
Solange is depressed: she's stopped smiling, she eats little, she says less. She has fainting fits. Her husband Raoul seeks to save her by enlisting Stephane, a stranger, to be her lover. Although he listens to Mozart and has every Pocket Book arranged in alphabetical order, Stephane fails to cheer Solange. She knits. She does housework. Everyone, including their neighbor a vegetable vendor, agrees that she needs a child, yet she fails to get pregnant by either lover. The three take a job running a kids' summer camp where they meet Christian, the precocious 13-year-old son of the local factory manager. It is Christian who restores Solange to laughter
Also Directed by Coline Serreau
The story of Pierre Brossolette, who was a talented student, journalist and a defender of human rights.
A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.
In this documentary by Coline Serreau, known for her feature film Why Not?, a selection of Frenchwomen in characteristically no-win situations discuss what they are experiencing and answer, if only by implication, the question: "What do women want?"
Three young men (Jacques, Pierre and Michel) share an apartment in Paris, and have many girlfriends and parties. Once, during a party, a friend of Jacques' tells him he has a quite compromising package to deliver, and asks him if he can leave it discreetly at their place. Jacques agrees and, as he works as a steward, flies away for a one month trip in Japan, telling Pierre and Michel about the package. Then, one of Jacques' former girlfriends drops a baby before their door, making Pierre and Michel believing it is the package they are waiting for. Their lives are then completely changed.
Marianne Riblon runs a small construction business in the south of France. Widowed and estranged from a daughter she hasn't seen in 15 years, she spends her time and working and has a life devoid of affection. An active member of the town council, she has strong conservative and racist convictions. One day, her daughter Charlotte calls her to tell her she's a grandmother. Her grandson, Nicolas, is 12 and is on his way to come see her. Charlotte wants her to take care of the child while she's being treated for leukemia. A the station, Marianne discovers the boy is half-black. The two learn to know each other...
As part of an intergalactic coalition, a well-meaning space alien volunteers to bring a message of self-actualization and harmony with nature to the one planet rejected by all her peers as incorrigible: Earth.
Marie (and her three fathers) are taking A-levels. Marie passes. She spends the summer in the country with her mother, Sylvia, who has returned from America with her Californian husband who has two sons. Marie falls in and out of love for the first time in front of her alarmed fathers, who see Marie's innocence slipping away at frightening speed, and their relationships with the two women become even more complicated.
Also Directed by Alain Corneau
In the sterile setting of a powerful multinational, two young women compete ... Isabelle is working under the orders of Christine, a woman of power she admires unreservedly.
French war ship is arriving to Polynesian shore during at 1918 - and adventures begin...
Two men break out of prison; a rival gang ambushes them. One is mortally wounded and tells the other, Mickey, to take him to the estate of a retired robber, Noel, who lives in comfort with his lovely and beloved wife, Nicole. The man dies, and Mickey, a menacing hothead, demands money of Noel. A few days later, Mickey returns to the estate, shoots up a dinner party and threatens them again. Noel sends Nicole to an hotel and goes to his old gang to help him hunt down the dangerous Mickey. Mickey has other problems, too, including heartache for a daughter he hardly knows. Young, eager cops tail Nicole, and all are on a complicated collision course.
The enigmatic but vivid imagery of this loosely plotted film is based on a similarly evocative novel by the Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, Noturno Indiano. An old friend of the hero's has been living in Bombay with a prostitute. His friend Peter Schlemihl (Otto Tausig) is a concentration camp survivor, who went to India after being captivated by a photograph he saw there. When the prostitute writes to him in Europe asking that he rescue his friend from a mysterious malaise, he flies into India to try and help. When he gets to Bombay, he discovers that his friend has disappeared. Following the clues left behind by the friend, and based on his acquaintance with him, he journeys to Madras to speak to a Theosophist dignitary there, and then journeys on to Portugues Goa. With each step of his journey, the hero (Jean-Hugues Anglade) becomes more identified with his friend, and re-enacts in his own person the transformations he must have experienced.
In the year 2222, a former drug dealer is kept in a state of hibernation. Reanimated, he tells his story. Leader in the narcotics market, his situation was prosperous until, during a political change, the government legalized its use.
Amélie, a young Belgian woman, having spent her childhood in Japan, decides to return to live there and tries to integrate in the Japanese society. She is determined to be a "real Japanese" before her year contract runs out, though it precisely this determination that is incompatable with Japanese humility. Though she is hired for a choice position as a translator at an import/export firm, her inability to understand Japanese cultural norms results in increasingly humiliating demotions. Though Amelie secretly adulates her, her immediate supervisor takes sadistic pleasure in belittling her all along. She finally manages to break Amelie's will by making her the bathroom attendant, and is delighted when Amelie tells her the she will not renew her contract. Amelie realizes that she is finally a real Japanese when she enters the company president's office "with fear and trembling," which could only be possible because her determination was broken by Miss Fubuki's systematic torture.
Nounours is the nickname of a "cousin" an informer with a special arrangement with the police: he gets 10% of the drugs seized thanks to his help. When his personal contact, inspector Maurin, commits suicide, inspector Gérard Delvaux takes over. Meanwhile, judge Lambert is uncovering the illegal practices of the policemen. Her persistent investigations, which had cornered Maurin, are leading to Gérard, and also to Nounours as the source of heroin that led to recent cases of deadly overdoses. Nounours promises Gérard increasingly bigger catches which he is intent on realising before he is forced to reveal who Nounours is to judge Lambert.
In this action thriller, Richard Anconina is Willie, a young and lonesome cop who loves lonesome cowboy music. While on a drug case Willie comes across a mulatta named Jo (model Ambre of Senegalese extraction), who is trapped in a dismal life of prostitution by two abusive Lebanese brothers. Risking his own life, Willie frees Jo from their fierce imprisonment, but the battered woman runs right back again.
Henri Savin has managed a trucking company for his lover, Dominique Montlaur, for many years. Now he is planning to leave her for Julie Manet, the woman he has made pregnant, and Dominique is hysterical. She first threatens suicide, then shows up at a meeting of Savin and Julie. Dominique tries everything she can think of to break Savin and Julie apart, to no avail. Frustrated in her efforts, she jumps off a cliff and dies. Savin insists that he and Julie lie to the police about the encounter, although Dominique's death was a suicide and therefore they had no direct hand in it. Detective Waldeck investigates Dominique's death.
This French documentary is comprised of almost 300 clips from the past 100 years of cinema Francaise. The images within the documentary are free flowing and not in chronological order; they are also not hindered with unnecessary narration or lengthy introductions. The film represents the collaborative efforts of a collective of the country's finest filmmakers.
Also Directed by Patrice Leconte
Probably no one in the public listening to the orchestra's rendition of Ravel's Bolero notices him but the drummer is a regular hero. For, although his mind is assailed by loads of unsettling thoughts and worries, he tries to keep the rhythm at any cost. He knows all too well that he falls out of time only once all the magic of the piece will vanish.
Three aging and failed comedians, Georges Cox, Victor Vialat and Eddie Carpentier, hit the road again with a lousy production of a lousy play, of course under the worst possible conditions.
Alice Tomaso gets out of jail, and goes looking for Léo and Julien, one of whom, it appears, is her father. On the way, she steals the wrong car - one belonging to the Russian mafia, and arrives at her destination with a gang of thugs out looking for her and the car.
Holidaymakers arriving in a Club Med camp on the Ivory Coast are determined to forget their everyday problems and emotional disappointments. Games, competitions, outings, bathing and sunburn accompany a continual succession of casual affairs.
A collection of short films by 16 European directors.
Because she picked the wrong door, Anna ends up confessing her marriage problems to a financial adviser named William Faber. Touched by her distress, somewhat excited as well, Faber does not have the courage to tell her that he is not a psychiatrist. From appointment to appointment, a strange ritual is created between them. William is moved and fascinated to hear the secrets no man ever heard.
It's night on a Paris bridge. A girl leans over Seine River with tears in her eyes and a violent yearning to drown her sorrows. Out of nowhere someone takes an interest in her. He is Gabor, a knife thrower who needs a human target for his show. The girl, Adele, has never been lucky and nowhere else to go. So she follows him. They travel along the northern bank of the Mediterranean to perform.
Also Directed by Jean Becker
Lucien, 14, can’t understand why his father, a serious and respected teacher, makes a fool of himself by dressing up as a clown and giving a show. André, Lucien’s father’s best friend, feels for the teenager and decides to reveal something from their mutual past that will explain the reason for Lucien’s father’s strange behavior.
After an accident, Pierre, a sixty years old grumpy man, ends up stuck on an hospital bed with a cast. While Pierre dreams of silence and solitude with his strong character, the whole world seems to invite himself to his hospital bed. Powerless, he has to support the daily visits of doctors,nurse and hospital staff then his closes including his brother Herve. Visits after visits, funny or touching, Pierre starts to reconsider some people and reexamine his environment. And after all, his stay becomes a second chance ...
Antoine Méliot is around 40 years old and has everything he needs to be happy: a beautiful wife, two adorable children, friends he can count on, a pretty house in the Yvelines and money. But one day he decides to ruin everything in one weekend.
In spring 1976, a 19-year-old beauty, her German-born mother, and her crippled father move to the town of a firefighter nicknamed Pin-Pon. Everyone notices the provocative Eliane. She singles out Pin-Pon and soon is crying on his shoulder (she's myopic and hates her reputation as a dunce and as easy); she moves in with him, knits baby clothes, and plans their wedding. Is this love or some kind of plot? She asks Pin-Pon's mother and aunt about the piano in the barn: who delivered it on a November night in 1955? Why does she want to know, and what does it have to do with her mother's sorrows, her father's injury, this quick marriage, and the last name on her birth certificate?
Jean-Paul Belmondo is a lovable lothario who delights in his womanizing ways in this ribald comedy adventure. When two women can't get enough of him, he is chased to Tahiti and back to Paris by admiring females. His experiences are exhausting to the point that he considers giving up his life as a ladies man.
Despite his fame, Taillandier has suddenly stopped painting. Deeply depressed, the sixty-year-old decides to go away. He has no clear goal and explains nothing to his close friends. During his travels, he has a strange encounter with Marylou, a wild teenager who was rejected by her mother. The lost girl and the man at the end of his tether will travel together awhile. Finally living like a father and daughter, at peace.
Rosa, a housekeeper in a NATO office in Paris, steals a micro film for her lover whom she hopes to marry.
In 1919, in a small town under the crushing heat of summer, a war hero is held prisoner in an abandoned barracks. Outside, his mangy dog barks night and day. Not far off in the countryside, an extraordinarily intelligent young woman works the land, waiting and hoping. A judge whose principles have been sorely shaken by the war is coming to sort out this case of which it is better not to speak.
A successful artist, weary of Parisian life and on the verge of divorce, returns to the country to live in his childhood house. He needs someone to make a real vegetable garden again out of the wilderness it has become. The gardener happens to be a former schoolfriend. A warm, fruitful conversation starts between the two men.
Also Directed by Michel Deville
Each evening, four men – a doctor, a journalist, a professor and a merchant – meet up in a deserted bar to play cards. As they play, the bar’s owner, her downtrodden barman (nicknamed “le paltoquet”) and a strange woman in white watch from a distance. One night, the card game is disturbed when a police inspector suddenly appears and declares that a dead body has been found nearby. Certain that one of the four men is the murderer, the inspector starts his investigation. All the evidence suggests that the doctor did the deed, but we soon learn that nothing is quite what it seems…
Laurent is theatrical director, his girl Valerie an aspiring actress. Their relationship begins to fracture when Valerie doesn’t get the role in Laurent’s play.
Unable to sleep in the sweltering heat, a young couple bares their bodies --- and their souls --- to each other over one life-changing night. They didn't know each other when the night began. It got hot, they stayed in. Now they know each other better than most.
Four young girls' love of boys put their newly opened all-services company in peril.
Tibere (Sami Frey) is a small-time hood who tries to get one of three airline hostesses to help him in his gold-smuggling operation in this light comedy. One woman is a snob, the second is adventurous, and Melanie (Mylene Demongeot) is sentimental about love. When Melanie and Tibere fall for each other, he is inspired to give up his life of crime for the woman he loves.
A movie lesson from famous French director Michel Deville - Nude in the town and village.
Lucky Jo and his three friends are little criminals, who try to live from small burglaries. But they never have luck - ever so often something inpredictable happens to Jo and gets one of them arrested. While Jo is in prison once again, they decide they'd better do without him in future. He decides to help them secretly...and unfortunately.
Lucia and Elena are best friends since childhood. They take a car trip from Paris to the country. Their conversations are overtly intimate, but more revealing is their tacit understanding of each others' personality and desires.
A great child group adventure music movie -no words spoken - le petite bande - small band - scape from their music class... excellent for every age, a film that you can watch happily with your children.
A troupe of French actors on tour in Normandy become involved in the events of WWII.
Also Directed by Jacques Deray
Marseille. Heaps of flowers and funeral wreaths... "A man who no longer defends his colors is no longer a man."
A spy story set in Vienna...
Vienna before the First World War: Clarissa Schuhmeister grows up in the monastery. Strict discipline determines her life until she meets the Frenchman Léonard and falls in love with him. Just when she expects a child from him, the First World War tears the happy couple apart. Out of pragmatism, Clarissa marries Gottfried, a deserter, with whom she makes a painful yet realistic agreement so that he will not be sent back to war. But she never feels love for him because she can not forget Léonard.
A cop is looking for the killer of his friend.
Two physicians, one old and one young, fall in love with the same woman, Juliette, a quixotic hairdresser. First, she is with Raoul, the older one; then passion for Clément, the younger doctor, takes over. Raoul fights back, playing on Clément's guilt and Juliette's lack of self-assurance; then, Clément makes his case to Juliette, abandons his fiancée, and takes her to the provinces where he sets up practice and asks her to have a baby. She panics and abruptly leaves Clément, taking up with Raoul again. When she contracts Hodgkin's disease and the treatment does no good, Raoul believes she has the malady of love. Is there a cure?
An ill-assorted group of international criminals executes a tightly-planned ransom sting in Spain. Things go along swimmingly until various tensions within the group come to the fore.
In 1945, as World War Two comes to a close, five small time crooks unite to form a gang. After several bold robberies they become notorious as "the front-wheel drive gang". The police attempt to stop their crime spree with little success, but how long will their luck last?
Vienna, in the 1930s. The attractive and famous writer Albert Rank receives the letter from a stranger. He discovers that she devoted her entire life to her boundless love. In her letter, Rose looks back on a variety of meetings with Albert: Since childhood, she is slavishly in love with him and she never got away from her throughout her life. In many encounters Rank could not recognize them, even if the shared moments had been wonderful. As an adult woman, Rose's love is too painful to go on, and she has dire consequences.
A French hit man is hired by a crime family to end the life of a rival mobster, but things fall apart when the boss who hired him is killed.
Also Directed by Raymond Depardon
On the 8th floor of the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Raymond Depardon's film features a minute of silence with eight artists and scientists: David Lynch, Patti Smith, William Eggleston, Takeshi Kitano, Ron Mueck, Jean Michel Alberola, Agnès Varda and Misha Gromov.
This documentary is a collection of footage of 14 suspects being 'interviewed' by the deputy public prosecutors.
Documentary Short
The proceedings of a Paris courtroom are the grist for this documentary. Drawn from over 200 appearances before the same female judge, the director chooses a dozen or so varied misdemeanor and civil hearings to highlight the subtle details of human behavior. In the process he draws attention to issues of guilt, innocence, policing and ethnicity in France.
Raymond Depardon sets out to meet French people to listen to them tell their tales. From Charleville-Mézières to Nice, Sète to Cherbourg, he invites people encountered in the street to continue their conversation in front of Depardon's camera and us, unfettered from any constraints.
The film allows mathematicians involved in the creation of the exhibition to express themselves in their own words and includes Sir Michael Atiyah, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, Carolina Canales González and Giancarlo Lucchini, Alain Connes, Nicole El Karoui, Misha Gromov, Cédric Villani and Don Zagier.
A new documentary by filmmaker-photographer Raymond Depardon – where justice and psychiatry meet.
The first of a documentary serie about rural France
Also Directed by Philippe Muyl
Tommy, un petit garçon qui vit seul avec sa mère, voit un cirque s'installer près de chez lui. Il part à la découverte de ce nouveau monde.
Zhigen, an old Chinese farmer, has lived alone in Beijing for over 20 years after moving to the city to allow his son Chongyi to attend university. He decides to make the long journey from Beijing to Yangshuo to honour the promise he made to his wife to bring back the bird that has been his only companion in the city. His daughter-in-law Qianying, a beautiful rich career woman, asks him to take along his granddaughter Renxing, an only child brought up in the lap of luxury. While grandfather and granddaughter set out on their journey - one travelling back in time, the other discovering her roots - Chongyi and Qianying, ponder the meaning of the life they have led in the sole pursuit of success and money.
Jacques et Martine, couple de bourgeois ordinaires, ont invité à dîner un ami perdu de vue depuis dix ans et devenu depuis une vedette des médias.
Based on a book by Nikos Athenassiadis titled A Naked Young Girl, this slight, uneven fantasy-romance takes place on an isolated Greek island with a unique, petrified tree -- a part of the reason why Mathieu, a geologist (Christophe Malavoy) has arrived to do some research there. Other than the boatman who ferries back and forth to the mainland, the island's only inhabitants are a fisherman and his very pretty daughter Eleni (Eleni Drogoumi). Eleni seems a bit different right from the beginning; on the one hand, she likes wandering around dressed only in a long shirt, and on the other, she has a penchant for swimming all night with the dolphins. When the usually arrogant geologist starts transferring some of his interest from rocks to Eleni's comings-and-goings, he wonders if there is not something fishy about her parentage.
Romain, the widowed father of eight-year-old Lucas, is a farmer in Brittany. He owns a herd of about twenty cows,one of which is called Maeva and is his son's favorite. The small Scottish animal is in fact his only friend, with the exception of Sarah, their new neighbor, a writer who has decided to settle in the country in search for peace and quiet. One day though, one of the cows catches BSE and, as a result, the whole herd has to be killed.Totally upset, Lucas decides he won't let his friend be put to death. Even if that means addressing the President himself...
Robert Millard has based his industrial kingdom - based on all the noise technologies - thanks to his marriage with the wealthy and cantankerous Irene, he blithely cheat for years. However, his last link with his pretty secretary, Eve, is the straw that broke the camel : Irene has indeed hired a detective-photographer, aptly named M.Colle order to have a maximum of incriminating shots. Threatened to divorce and thus to total ruin by his wife, the unfaithful husband should give up and dismiss Eve.
An old man who has one interest in life, collecting butterflies, has his life changed by an eight year old girl.
Also Directed by Anne-Marie Miéville
TV commercial (commissioned by Swiss tobacco company F.J. Burrus S.A.) for Parisienne cigarettes.
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
"Inspired by the correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke and his psychoanalyst paramour Lou Andreas-Salomé, Miéville's sophisticated study of modern love charts the turbulent relationship between a filmmaker (Bunel) and a volatile actor (Blanc). Threaded throughout are intoxicating moments of music by Mahler and Arvo Pärt, dance, and a dialogue between two Greek statues." - BAM
Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films
An elderly couple and a younger man and woman follow up failed seduction attempts with conversation about love and the meaning of life.
A daring deconstruction of consumerist behavior featuring a robot and Miss Clio Darty, with a voiceover by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, this philosophical "report," like so many of Godard's commissions, was rejected by its funders.
"One Woman, five men, five breakups." - BAM
A video letter composed for Amnesty International's 'Lest We Forget' series.
Short film by Ann-Marie Mieville on Godard's model for his exhibition "Collages de France"
Also Directed by Robert Kramer
The French Ministry of Culture commissioned films on the cultural decade "en chantiers". Robert Kramer makes one of the six short films that illustrates the cultural side of the decade Mittérand. Here we see a director of cinema in the suburbs of Caen, in her room lined with flower paper. This for art and essay cinema. There, the critic Serge Daney in a sailor's cap, for a chat by the fire. An overview of French cinema today, "Pickpocket" on television. Then back on you. The camera slides on the desk that we imagine to be Kramer's. Finally, the camera flies over Paris, slides along the facades, stops on a window, entering the skylight: "The films invite to see ... I invite you to see Jean Genet's hotel room."
Combining newsreel footage, still photographs, interviews, and analytical narration, this documentary focuses on the antifascist, anti-imperialist efforts of labor groups, peasants, and working-class soldiers to liberate Portugal from the control of the government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Route One is the first major U.S. highway. 5000 km along the Atlantic coast, from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida. Doc, a physician who spent many years in Africa, returns to the U.S. and decides to reconnect with his home country by walking the legendary Route One.
A young couple who are amateur roller-skating buffs practice their chosen avocation at a Parisian roller rink. Their hopes rise with a chance to go to Chicago to compete, especially when a magazine reporter assures them that his company will back them -- but then lets them know some sex-related business is a part of the package. Caught up in the couple's drama are several other characters who look like they might need some help themselves, making the problem of how to get to the Windy City seem more and more insoluble.
In 1990, Robert Kramer receives a grant from the Ford Foundation. He goes to Berlin for 6 months, where he makes an hour long single video shot (for a festival) in the bathroom of his apartment. Facing the camera, the filmmaker thinks, alone, about the fall of the Berlin wall. "I've already spent 6 weeks here. With all the events in eastern Europe, it was like a hurricane. Berlin is a city where you feel the biggest changes, where you meet Polish immigrants, or others, escaping. Berlin will become a very violent city. What happens in eastern Europe is a bit like the end of the civil war in the US. The North, and all it's power stimulated by years of war, took over the South, who has lost everything. And there is this German past, the war, on all levels.
The film concerns a group of disparate types who support themselves by running guns to the Arabs. On the surface, it would seem that these characters are bad guys. In fact, the guns are to be used by a resistance group who hope to continue shipping oil to the West, despite the despotic curbs imposed upon fuel shipments by their leaders.
Lyrical video letter by Robert Kramer to his friend Paul McIsaac captured during the editing of “Route One/USA”.
This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.
Directed by Robert Kramer
Also Directed by Jacques Doillon
1794, During the French Revolution : Benjamin Constant meets Germaine de Staël and falls madly in love with her. He has the spirit of a young writer, weighed down by the hardships of life. Germaine, daughter of a wellknown figure, is one of the most brilliant woman of the century. Early on, Germaine lutes against Benjamin's love and only admits ot admiring his spirit. But, little by little, a violent and indispensable passion bonds them together. The two lovers continue to love one another and to struggle against this love for a period of twenty years. Season after season they meet and bask in each other's company. These intimate moments are at times ambivalent, but never lack in obstinance and passion.
Seventeen-year-old Emma is invited to filmmaker Paul’s house after sending him the outline of a film. Ostensibly there to work on the outline with him she spends her time flirting with Paul, his wife, and his daughter.
Marc, a troubled teenager, is bored in his native, depressing city of Sete. One day, a simple phone call makes him aware of the existence of Stephanie, a sister he has never met. Armed with a pistol his mother found, he goes out to find her. He steals money from a perfume shop, and is then stopped by a policeman who wants to search him. In the car, Marc threatens the policeman with his gun, demanding that he helps him find his sister...
Every Saturday, to the great despair of his wife, Emmanuel finds his daughter Elise, fruit of a first union. A demanding and excessive father in his passions, he went to lay a loving trap for Elise.
Raja is a nineteen year old orphan literally and figuratively scarred by life. Fred is an emotionally bankrupt westerner living amid his plush gardens and palm trees. Set against the backdrop of contemporary Marrakech, Raja is a cross-cultural drama about a wealthy middle-aged Frenchman's complex relationship with this poor local girl. Fred's attempts to seduce Raja, and their mutual attempts at manipulation, are fractured by their gross disparity of income, age and cultural sophistication.
A four-year-old girl must come to terms with the loss of her mother and the reality of death in this award-winning French drama. Little Ponette (Victoire Thivisol) is riding in a car with her mother when they're involved in a serious accident; Ponette survives, but her mother does not. Her father (Xavier Beauvois) initially reacts with anger over his late wife's careless driving, while her Aunt Claire (Claire Nebout) tries to comfort the child by telling her about Jesus and the resurrection. However, none of this does much to reassure Ponette or clarify her confusion about the practical realities and spiritual dilemma posed by death. In time, Ponette and her cousins Matiaz (Matiaz Caton) and Delphine (Delphine Schiltz) are sent off to boarding school, where they have to resolve their confusion and loss on their own. ~Mark Deming, Rovi
When a famous playwright invites the cast of his new play - including his enchanting assistant, his ex-wife and her new lover - to his country estate, a series of seductions and surprising alliances ensue.
Jacques returns after a long absence to his wife Dominique and their daughter Lola in their isolated house, located on a hillside in Provence. Dominique is crouching and crying. She had asked Jacques to go because she could not stand him seeing her crying. Jacques powerlessly witnesses the excesses of Dominique's emotions. She understands that he loves another woman, and ousts him again...
Shortly after returning home one evening with her husband, Alma is visited by her one-time lesbian lover Carole. In the ensuing emotional torrent, Alma allows herself to be abducted by Carole and taken to a hotel, pursued by a young girl - an unnamed friend of Carole - and an eccentric bystander posing as a private detective. Before Alma and Carole can resolve their situation, Alma's husband Andrew appears on the scene and, in a mad frenzy, attempts to reclaim his wife…
In this argumentative, fractious drama about a warped sense of male-female love, Bruno (Jacques Bonnafe) who is clearly not playing with a full deck, devises a means to test the love of his girlfriend Isabelle (Ann Gisel Glass). Since Isabelle had been in love with Alain (Xavier Deluc) in the past, Bruno invites Alain to a surprise birthday party for her at a hotel -- what better way to judge her feelings than to get them together? Alain arrives with his current girlfriend Lio (Fanny Bastien) to find that the "party" is only a foursome. Soon after the two couples start the evening off, their polite exteriors deteriorate as they bicker on, and on, and on.
Also Directed by Chantal Akerman
Presented in 2 parts, this 83 minute piece documents Wieder-Atherton's idea to do a set of pieces from across central and eastern Europe, including Russia. Some weren't originally written for cello, but she had them transcribed. Some were songs for voices, which goes with Wieder-Atherton saying in an earlier film she made with Chantal Akerman that she aspires to play the cello in a way that it carries the specificity of emotion of the human voice. She explains at the beginning of both parts how she feels each country in the region has it's own personality expressed in its music, coming from its individual history and culture, but that each land in the area is also 'impregnated' as she puts it, by the others, so there are certain elements that run throughout.
When her mother moves in, the life of a writer gets crowded.
Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.
Made out of the last sequence of the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 Seven monitors (in sync) video installation, color, sound . The monitors are placed on pedestals and displayed in a circle .
Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.
Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York.
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.
“My mother laughs prelude” is a performance from the book that Chantal made about her mother. In 2013, Akerman’s mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn’t talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. "My Mother Laughs" is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.
Also Directed by Jean-Loup Hubert
The film is set in France in August 1944 at the end of the war. German troops are in retreat as the allies are coming in. Two French boys run from home and on their journey they stumble upon a German soldier. Soon they become friends and together they head towards Lyon...
This Great War drama opens in the trenches during an artillery bombardment. Receiving bayonet wounds, young Simon (Guillaume Depardieu) drops out of the action, joining other injured soldiers at a Brittany hospital. One day he meets schoolteacher Marthe (Clotilde Courau), who lives in the household of the hospital's head doctor (Bernard Giraudeau). Soon a romance begins to develop. Cinematography by Kevin Jewison, son of director Norman Jewison.
Louis, a nine-year-old boy from Paris, spends his summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother Claire has lodged him with her girlfriend Marcelle and her husband Pelo while she's having her second baby. There Louis makes friends with Martine, the ten-year- old girl next door, and learns from her about life.
When the mother of a "tribe" of five children leaves for good, their inept father is not sure how to keep the family clothed and fed, and without the help of his neighbor Simone, he would be nowhere. She is attracted to him but eventually gives up on the relationship. Meanwhile, the father grabs his brood and they take off for Paris in search of the wife. But Simone accidentally ends up on the same train...
Isabelle and Maxime are a pair of lighthearted lovers -- that is, until Isabelle gets the itch for motherhood. When she confesses her desire for a child, Maxime panics. As a cartoonist by trade he is far from financially stable, so he outright rejects the idea of parenthood. What follows is a roller-coaster romance full of recriminations and reconciliations, until Maxime must ultimately decide whether his fear of becoming a parent is a reason to leave.
In 1960, in a coastal town near to Nantes, Jean Ripoche lives with his wife Liliane, their four children and Liliane’s father Lucien. Jean divides his time between running his plumbing business and making a float for the Nantes carnival. The Ripoche’s ordered lives are thrown into turmoil when Jean’s former friend, Yvon Legualoudec, returns to the town – with his black wife Annabelle and their three children. Before he disappeared twenty years ago, without saying a word, Yvon was Jean’s rival for Liliane’s affections. As bitter memories resurface, the relationship between Jean, Yvon and Liliane become strained.
Also Directed by Jean-Michel Carré
This documentary follows a number of French women prisoners during the time of their imprisonment and after their release. Many of them are "in" for minor drug and prostitution-related offenses, and at least half of them are HIV positive. One woman promises she will kill herself before her beauty fades from the AIDS syndrome: two years later the filmmaker captures her, wan and wasted, but out of prison. Most of these women have grave difficulties finding work or housing when they are released, and are forced to resort to the same desperate measures that got them incarcerated in the first place.
A misanthropic Parisian street punk learns some difficult lessons after being captured for assaulting and robbing a man in this interesting French drama. This has not been the first time young Denis Lavant has been in trouble, and this time the judge sentences him to the Coral, an experimental open community founded in 1975 by Claude Sigala, in the wilderness of the Camargue. There he encounters a group of inmates just as neurotic and messed up as he is.
The idea of the current project was born during the making of the long documentary “Charbons Ardents” which dealt with the present-day struggle of a group of coal miners who had bought out their mine and become its sole owners. These miners accepted an offer put to them by the director Brendan Wheatley, to create an opera from the start of their adventure. The film will follow the creation of this new type of opera where two worlds, that of miners and artists come together to recreate the battle for Tower Colliery.
Documentary charting the rise of Chinese art following the death of Mao, and how some artists embraced Western styles while other critiqued it by hijacking communist propaganda.
Also Directed by Gérard Frot-Coutaz
This slice-of-life drama about an elderly couple and their estranged son covers twenty-four fateful hours that begin with the usual daily routine for the retired pair of former teachers (Micheline Presle and Claude Pieplu). Then their son telephones to say he will be coming over with his girlfriend and the normal pattern is changed, as he visits them rarely. While the mother is obsequious to her son when he arrives, past hurts and resentments bubble up during lunch, making it difficult for the son to tell them he is getting married. This is news enough, but the effect that announcement has on the son and his fiancée is unexpected and events later on in the day take a turn for the worse.
Also Directed by René Allio
Madame Bertini, a newly widowed 70-year-old miser, has lived a sheltered life in squalour. She determines to venture into the modern world and have as much fun as possible, and in doing so finds that she loves it. She blows her life savings, much to the disapproval of the young people around her.
Anne, an unhappily married actress, temporarily assumes the identity of her sister Simone, the successful director of a London fashion house.
Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Details of the crime and of the trial that followed are told from varied perspectives, including the written confession of Pierre himself, and form a rich and complex narrative that interrogates the concepts of “truth” and “history”.
Pierre is a middle-aged factory worker with plenty of unresolved anger. After his father's death, his mother feels compelled to move in with him. Having just moved there with his beautiful girlfriend, he begins to feel the pressure. When the May Day revolt begins, he goes crazy.
In 1941, those who had remained around too long to completely escape the Nazi blitzkrieg had one small, slim chance to escape persecution. They could travel to Marseilles and attempt to get the servile but still nominally independent government of Vichy France to grant them an exit visa. Then they could take passage to safer climes on one of the neutral vessels that stopped there. This drama, based on a novel by Anna Seghers, follows the fates of a small group of desperate people who are attempting to do just that.
Michel left Marseilles to Italy when he was twenty years old. Courageous and active, he has succeeded in the construction industry. Thirty years later, his return to Marseilles, for his aunt's burial will abruptly change the life of all of his family, who was first fascinated by his social success. He is regarded as the son who made it like wonder. Michel is the only one who has emigrated. They have all remained in the home country ("le pays") and their social status has hardly changed: workmen, small employees, craftsmen, all living in a modest framework.
In the streets of Marseille, René Allio encounters, once again, the spaces of his childhood, and remembers his family history.
Also Directed by Nadine Trintignant
Catherine and Marcello are secluded in their house, living under the candlelight. Unable to accept the injustice behind the loss of their nine-month-old baby, they face a slow but definite self-destruction.
A man witnesses a suicide and starts imagining that it was a murder committed by himself.
Paul and Sarah are married and have two children. He is a press photographer in a newspaper that rather seeks sensational business. She does not work and it weighs on her, especially since Paul is often called to move, leaving her alone. To make a "scoop", Paul courted Solange, the daughter of a minister who had an accident. One day, Sarah sees them in the street. Jealous and annoyed, she tries to get closer to Paul ...
40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. The results run the gamut from Zhang Yimou's convention-thwarting joke to David Lynch's bizarre miniature epic.
August 1939. The fate of four young people, Ramona, Georges, Brigitte and Hans is upset by the outbreak of war.
No overview found
Also Directed by Denis Amar
A pair of French detectives enter a different world after they are assigned to solve a puzzling double homicide that occurred in an African neighborhood in Paris. The corpses of the two masked Malian women were discovered ritually mutilated and hanging from a ceiling. The detectives' search leads them to a Malian father and his 18-year-old daughter. The father confesses to the crime, but further investigation reveals that he is lying. Even more puzzled than before, the two investigators consult a noted professor who tries to help them understand the true nature of the crime. The story is based on a book by controversial French academic Tobie Nathan, a self-proclaimed "ethno-psychiatrist," who has been researching the problems experienced by France's many immigrants, particularly African ones, as they wrestle with the clash between their native beliefs and their new culture.
The series follows the adventures of lighthearted Jean-Paul Moulin, a police Commissaire, and his team as they solve crimes.
In search of freedom, Duchess Alexandra, cousin of Empress Sissi, leaves Austria and her violent husband to settle incognito in Paris.
Baudin (Michel Serrault) and Tayar (Wadeck Stanczak) become trapped in a movie theater while trying to fend off a gang of marauding juvenile thugs. The two agree to settle their personal differences in their fight over a pretty female in order to halt the violent siege.
Postwar France was slow to recover from the after-effects of the World War Two. The economy was doing poorly, and many people were poor and homeless, sleeping under bridges, etc. The winter of 1953-54 proved particularly difficult for these people, as it was one of the coldest on record. Father Pierre (Lambert Wilson), a parish priest, on seeing the suffering of these people (and their frequent death from the cold), was moved to write the French government seeking help for them. When his letter, which was published in the newspapers, succeeded in rousing overwhelming popular support for helping the homeless, he was able to form a charitable group (still active today) titled "Les Chiffoniers d'Emmaus," or "The Ragpickers of Emmaus" to channel help to them. This biographical film tells the true story of Abbe Pierre's successful efforts in those years.
Also Directed by Sarah Moon
40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. The results run the gamut from Zhang Yimou's convention-thwarting joke to David Lynch's bizarre miniature epic.
A story about a father who kidnaps his daughter and which the director describes as a love story that ended badly.
Documentary about photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, including footage of him in his Paris and Provence homes and many stills of his works. He talks about his passion for drawing, offers his opinion on different types of photography and shares photos of himself.
A retelling of Bluebeard by renowned photographer Sarah Moon