Ariane Ascaride
Daniel leaves prison. He returns to Marseilles where Mathilda, his daughter, has just given birth. Nicolas, his spouse, a self-employed driver, is exhausted while Mathilda is a sales assistant on a trial basis. But, one night, Nicolas is assaulted by taxi drivers determined to reduce unfair competition.
By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.
A woman, a man, two cultures and years separating them: will Adriana and Mohamed overcome the prejudices of the world around them? A sincere love story in the heart of Southern Italy.
Aram, a young man from Marseille of Armenian origin, blows up the Turkish ambassador's car in Paris. Gilles, a young cyclist who was passing at that precise moment, is seriously injured. Aram's mother feels guilty and feels the need to visit Gilles at the hospital and beg for his forgiveness, something that Gilles does not understand. Against the advice of his comrades in Beirut, Aram decides to go meet his victim.
Ariane is having her birthday party but no one comes. She decides to leave at the seaside and take part with her life that disappointed her.
Based on a true story. In Léon Blum high school in Créteil (France), a history teacher decides to have her weakest 10th grade class take a national history competition. This will change them.
"Fanny" is the second part of the "Marseille trilogy", made by Marcel Pagnol with the generic name of "Marius, Fanny and César". Fanny falls in love and is abandoned by Marius. Now she discovers she is pregnant. Her mother and Marius's father, César, persuade her to accept the romantic advances of a much older man. To save face, Fanny accepts to marry Honoré Panisse, a rich merchant of the Vieux Port, 30 years her senior who will recognize her son.
The South of France. Internationally famous pianist Aurore collapses one night during a performance, over-exhausted from too many concerts. Tired of music, she believes she no longer has anything to offer her public. Then she meets Jean, an electrician who installs residential security systems. Despite their differences, they immediately fall in love and plan a new life together. Jean intends to leave his long-time partner, Dolorès, but she will stop at nothing to keep him.
The Art of Love is composed of several chapters, which follows several Parisian couples.
A union pensioner and his wife are robbed, but find that merely getting the assailants brought to justice is not enough for their consciences.
The story of the relationship between Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso
A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.
This gripping historical drama recounts the story of Armenian-born Missak Manouchian, a woodworker and political activist who led an immigrant laborer division of the Parisian Resistance on 30 operations against the Nazis in 1943. The Nazis branded the group an Army of Crime, an anti-immigrant propaganda stunt that backfired as the team's members became martyrs for the Resistance.
Paloma is a serious and highly articulate but deeply bored 11-year-old who has decided to kill herself on her 12th birthday. Fascinated by art and philosophy, she questions and documents her life and immediate circle, drawing trenchant and often hilarious observations on the world around her. But as her appointment with death approaches, Paloma finally meets some kindred spirits in her building's grumpy janitor and an enigmatic, elegant neighbor, both of whom inspire Paloma to question her rather pessimistic outlook on life.
Centers on three childhood friends: Muriel, Francois and Rene. Partners in crime (burglaries, to be precise), the three end their "criminal" activities after one of their attempted burglaries fails. They vow never to see each other again until, however, Muriel's son is kidnapped, which leads the three to join forces again to get the ransom money.
Emmanuelle lives in the suburbs near a shopping mall. Since her father's death, she feels increasingly out of sync with the world around her. Her mother is distracted, high school bores her. She has just turned 17 and, this particular year, her life will take an entirely different turn.
In Paris, the emotional and professional tribulations of a musician and his roommate. Freshly installed in Paris, David, a shy and clumsy musician, falls madly in love with his student, Julia. He tries everything to seduce her. His roommate, Anne, encourages, advises, and consoles... passionately!
This is a story about returning to ones ancestral homeland. Anna is a cardiologist who discovers her father has fled to his native Armenia after being diagnosed with a heart problem. Despite their contentious relationship, she sets out to bring her father back for this operation. Anna is a tough-minded, headstrong woman with little feeling for her fathers homeland or patience with its politics and socially intrusive culture, yet she finds this journey not only a reunion of sorts, but one of reconciliation as well.
French drama, the debut film from writer-director Eléonore Faucher. Teenager Claire (Lola Naymark) discovers she is pregnant and decides to keep it a secret. Abandoning her dead-end supermarket job, she is taken on as an apprentice by couturiere Madame Mélikian (Ariane Ascaride), who is grieving over the death of her own child. As the two women work together, they soon develop a supportive and fam
For over twenty years, Robert Guédiguian has been making films that occupy an essential place in French cinema. In film after film, he evokes the social chronicle of his working-class childhood. We witness an adventure rich in reflections on the film director’s profession, political commitment, the intimate relation between real and fictional characters, and a shared desire to create.
Etienne is crazy about ice skating and videoing his daily life with a digital camera. He records his mother, friends, and geography teacher. Initially his intention is to setup a date between his mother and his teacher, however, he starts to realize that he is infatuated with the teacher himself.
The 20-year-old Juliette tries to come to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, despite a lack of support from the father of the child and from her mother.
Marie-Jo and Her Two Lovers (French: Marie-Jo et ses deux amours) is a 2002 French drama film directed by Robert Guédiguian. It was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
A charming comedy about going on a rather long walk. Félix is a laid-back guy living in the bleak northern coastal town of Dieppe. He lives happily with his lover Daniel and is a soap opera enthusiast and HIV-positive. After losing his job, Félix decides to find the father he never knew in Marseilles. Agreeing to meet Daniel in the southern port city in a week's time, Félix throws on his backpack and starts hiking. On his way, he discovers that family need not always be connected by blood.
Two friends with very different personalities decide to write a script for a movie. Their discussions and confrontations are constant, but the story slowly takes shape around a poor family that has a small car repair business. Times are hard and will have to fight to prevent a multinational tear down the garage.
Single mother Nadia is surviving on welfare while transport strikes are paralyzing France in December 1995. While watching the news, she recognizes the father of her child among the strikers and decides to go and search for him. But she has nowhere to go. The film, shot almost entirely at night, carries documentary qualities, part of which is due to the appearances of actual railroad workers in several group scenes.
A dark tale of working-class life in Marseilles, a city in crisis. Interesting characters include a hard-bitten but compassionate fish market worker with a drug addicted daughter and a moody bartender with a shocking secret life.
From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.
Jeannette is a single mother living in a working-class community in Marseilles; she tries to support herself and her two kids on her salary as a check-out girl at a supermarket and lives in an apartment complex where everyone is thrown into close proximity with everyone else. Marius is working as a security guard at a cement factory that has gone out of business; he's also squatting in the building, since the plant is soon to be demolished and he'll be needing his money later on. One day, Jeannette happens by the factory, and spotting several cans of paint, tries to take two of them home with her. Marius spots her and tries to chase her away, while she rails at him with curses against the capitalist system. The next day, an apologetic Marius appears at her doorstep, cans of paint in hand; the two soon become friendly, and a romance begins to bloom, though it quickly becomes obvious that Jeannette's romance novel fantasies are a bit off the mark from what Marius has in mind.
À la vie, à la mort ! (1995) In Estaque, a northern suburb of Marseilles, stuck between oil refinery smokestacks and the Mediterranean sea, a handful of die-hards has taken refuge in a cabaret. There is José, the owner, a big-hearted gypsy who loves cars and women's bodies; Joséfa, his wife, the establishment's stripper despite her advanced years and Marie-Sol who climbs the hill every day to visit Notre-Dame de la Garde and beseech Virgin Mary to give her a child. There is Patrick, her husband who has been unemployed for ages but who is kind despite appearances and their friend Jaco who is having a hard time. His wife and daughters hate him for not keeping up on the mortgage repayments. Last but not least is Papa Carlossa who believes that Franco still rules Spain and fantasizes about bumping him off.
Perhaps you have to love dogs in order to sell tins of slimy mystery meat to their owners. At any rate Martin, who is indifferent to pets in general, isn't doing all too well in his marketing job at Floppy Dog Foods. But right now this is the least of his problems: he has made a British au-pair pregnant in a one night stand; and while he is trying to figure out how to deal with this, his ex-wife (who divorced him over his not wanting children) and his mother (a militant anti-overpopulation, pro-birth control, pro-abortion activist) have a few comments to offer on the situation. Before his own child is born, Martin clearly has some growing up of his own to do.
In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.
In Marseille, Rosa, 60, dedicated her life to family and politics with the same sense of duty. Everyone considers her unwavering, until the day she falls in love with Henri. For the first time, Rosa is afraid to commit. Between the pressure of his family, politics and a desire to indulge in her feelings, the conflict is difficult to sustain.
