Poutine, le nouvel Empire

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.

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.

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.