Denis Lavant
The year 1900 is just around the corner. In winter, St. Petersburg transforms into a fairytale-like wonderland where frozen rivers and canals bustle with activity. The city is home to 18-year-old Matvey who works as a delivery boy at a famous local bakery. The son of a poor lamplighter, his only treasure is a pair of silver-plated skates he inherited from his father. Meanwhile, a high-ranking official’s daughter Alisa is feeling like a prisoner in her father’s mansion. One day their paths cross.
It all happened on a dark night. The Man was tired of being a stranger, tired of being insulted by others simply because he speaks Arabic to a wife who speaks French with their beloved mixed race son. He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered.
Yuri, 16, has lived all his life in Gagarin Towers, a vast red-brick housing project on the outskirts of Paris. He dreams of becoming an astronaut. When plans to demolish Gagarin Towers leak out, Yuri joins the resistance. With his friends Diana and Houssam, he embarks on a mission to save their home, which has become his “starship.”
All girls volley ball team The Falcons end up stranded in the middle of nowhere after their mini-van breaks down. Little do they know they landed in degenerate hunters' territory and the hunt is on. Thus begins a very long night where they must run for their lives and test their team spirit. But the girls are more resourceful than it appears. In the heart of the forest, the tables are about to turn between hunter and hunted...
Women and men are lost in their thoughts at random hours of the day and streets of the city. From this sudden intimacy, the murmurs of their little inner voice let us hear the anxieties of love.
1950s America. Since his mother‘s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure.
After waking up in an apartment where only the night before a party was raging, Sam is forced to come to grips with reality: He is now alone and the living dead have invaded the streets of Paris. Petrified with fear, Sam is going to have to barricade himself inside the building and organize his survival. But is he really the sole survivor?
Un peuple et son roi crosses the destinies of the men and women of the population, and those of historical figures. Their meeting place is the newly founded National Assembly. At the heart of the story lie the fate of the king and the birth of the French Republic…
Paris, France, early 19th century. The legendary convict François Vidocq lives in disguise trying to escape from a tragic past that torments him. When, after an unfortunate event, he crosses paths with the police chief, he makes a bold decision that will turn the ruthless mastermind of the Parisian underworld against him.
1981, Quiberon, a small village on the coast of Brittany, France. Hilde Fritsch arrives to visit her old friend who has retreated to a spa hotel to escape the daily pressures of her life. Her friend is world-famous star Romy Schneider, but together, they appear like two regular women who are just happy to be reunited. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Hilde is supposed to offer the support the sensitive actress needs to be able to truly face her own demons.
The Bra tells the story of the lonely and soon to be pensioned train driver Nurlan. On his last day of work his train hits a clothes line and snags a white bra with blue dots with it. Determined to find the owner, Nurlan leaves no stone unturned and embarks on a dazzling journey through the neighbourhoods of Baku, trying to convince as many women as possible to try on the lost bra.
An isolated village welcomes a new miller with open arms. Problem is, the man howls at the moon every night. His integration is starting well… French comedy at its best.
Damien Nadeau-Daneau, a young filmaker, is unable to finish a movie he started with french actor Denis Lavant. Indebted, he’s working at a post-production company, far from his artistic ideals. On the eve of his 33rd birthday, he is self-centered, unsatisfied, and lost in his own life. With no drama of his own, he is confronted with that of others who he meets over the course of his life. He will discover that reality is way more interesting than fiction.
A silent fisherman in Texas, a blazing oil field in North Dakota, a mysterious community in Virginia, a women’s prison in Oregon, and a modernist home in California are the ostensible subjects of Austin Lynch and Matthew Booth’s new feature, GRAY HOUSE. But as meditations upon nature, isolation, decadence, and destitution, they are flawless conduits for seamless blends of documentary and narrative form, and stunning explorations of sound, image, and cinematic time. Mysterious and elusive, yet possessing an aesthetic and sensory unity (appearances by Denis Lavant, Aurore Clément, and Dianna Molzan mix with direct addresses from real-life laborers and inmates), GRAY HOUSE quietly recalibrates one’s sense of the world and our place within it.
A woman of Turkish ascent, following ancient Anatolian healing rites, dreams her way through fragments of memory, both personal and collective. Guided by a mythological character, Kheiron the Centaur, she travels freely between the ruins of an ancient Roman hospital and the streets of a mountain village, high above the river Euphrates. Time and space become dislocated, opening up passages between worlds. An inner experience translated into a film poem, KAZARKEN explores memory as a place of struggle against oblivion and the violence of hidden history.
Losing his memory after a mugging, a man known only as 'MP' (Missing Person) leaves his home and sets out on a journey - in search not only for his memory but perhaps also for a new identity. MP finds himself confronted by a world in which there are no longer any certainties; an era of crisis on many levels. On his travels from country to country, portrayed via an associative image montage and through a series of strange, illuminating, sometimes comic encounters, MP attempts to gain insight into the complexity of life in the 21st-century West - into what commentators have called an age of 'rolling catastrophe'.
Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.
Kahina Zadi, 32, a French police officer travels to Kiruna in Sweden to investigate the bestial murder of a French citizen. Together with Anders, a Swedish prosecutor of Sami origin, she begins an investigation. Soon new killings start to happen and the first victim turns out to be the tip of a very dark iceberg. The victims seemingly have nothing in common more than that they are all being killed in a well-planned and vicious manner. In their hunt for the truth, both Kahina and Anders are forced to deal with their own past that they have repressed. A personal journey through a painful past becomes the key to succeed in preventing the violent killings that affects the small mining community of Kiruna.
1948 - Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Denmark, in exile, accused of collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of the France. He is accompanied by Lucette, his wife and his cat Bebert.
In 1952, Argentina's beloved First Lady, Eva Perón, died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. A renowned embalmer was commissioned by the grieving Juan Perón to preserve her body for display, and Argentines flocked to be near "Evita". Three years later, when his government was overthrown by a military coup, Perón fled the country before he could make arrangements for the transportation of his wife's body. The military junta now in control kidnapped the corpse; so afraid were they of Eva's symbolic power that they even made it illegal to utter her name.
Young journalist Sebastian Zöllner is writing an article on artist Manuel Kaminski. Zöllner hopes that Kaminski dies soon, so that he can cash in on his article.
At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.
Julien Schulmann is a comedian. He has just lost his father, a Polish Jew and extermination camp survivor. Before he died, his father left a "will" in which he requested that his other son, Pierre, who hasn't been heard from for two years, spread his ashes in Poland. His father's preference comes as a rude shock for Julien, and it opens a chasm inside him, slowly bringing to light an unspeakable secret.
During the height of summer, Caroline, a forty-year-old Parisian and mother, arrives in a small village in the south of France. She must hastily organize the funeral of her mother, a flighty lawyer, whom she barely used to see. Caroline is welcomed by Pattie, who likes to talk about her love affairs with the local men to anyone who'll listen. Then, while the whole valley gets ready for the traditional mid-summer dance, Caroline's mother's corpse mysteriously disappears...
The director of a department store is murdered. He is discovered in a park, a bunch of daffodils on his chest.
He was called the Champion of Champions. The strength and strong-willed character Poddubniy composed legends. And 50 great fighter effortlessly overcame young athletes, and questions of honor and justice did not know compromises. And only love could put Russian Heroes on both blades
The image of a mysterious, solitary filmmaker - a cineaste maudit - who flees from both the media and the public, is unrelentingly bound to the figure of Leos Carax, in France. Elsewhere, the real focus is on his films and he is considered to be an icon of world cinema. Mr.X dives into the poetic and visionary world of an artist who was already a cult figure from his very first film. Punctuated by interviews and unseen footage, this documentary is most of all a fine-tuned exploration of the poetic and visionary world of Leos Carax, alias "Mr.X".
A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille – so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town’s goings-on.
A making-of documentary of Leos Carax's Holy Motors. Present during the shoot, Salomé catches exacting and inspiring moments of the production and adds interviews with its main participants (the actors Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, and Kylie Minogue, and the cinematographer, Caroline Champetier).
In cities like Paris there are countless people from Eastern Europe who have forsaken their homelands because they can see no future there. Lucia and her little daughter Marussia are two such people. They have been thrown out by the Russian acquaintances they were staying with and must tramp the streets with their trolley suitcases searching for somewhere else to live. A Russian Orthodox priest offers them their first night's shelter. They spend the second night in a homeless hostel and party through the third with a chance acquaintance. On the fourth night they sleep clandestinely in a cinema and on the fifth with a Russian artist in a hotel … Lucia is good-looking, dresses elegantly and is certainly not shy of men. This serves the mother and her daughter well. In spite of all the uncertainties in their lives, the two frequently share tender moments.
In the 16th century in the Cévennes, a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas leads a happy and prosperous family life. When a lord treats him unjustly, this pious, upstanding man raises an army and puts the country to fire and sword in order to have his rights restored.
Denis Lavant reads long passages from Luis Buñuel's semi-autobiographical "My Last Sigh". From this text, without film excerpts, Laurence Garret travels in the footsteps of Buñuel, from Calanda to Zaragoza, Madrid to Toledo, Spain to Mexico.
Late 1950s, the CIA Office in New York after viewing the footage shot by their agent, investigators are puzzled how Marcel Dassault, the French engineer, he managed to build better than their planes? Order of the White House, four officers flew to Paris. Their mission: to solve the mystery Dassault. This man has a unique course because besides being a genius of aviation, it is also patron of the press, arms dealer, MP ...
During the summer of the year 1610 one of the first telescopes made by Galileo ends up in the hands of Jean Kepler in Prague who at the time was the astronomer of Emperor Rudolp II. Kepler observes the night-sky as nobody has seen it before him. His observation platform becomes the meeting place of Prague's imperial court. In this entourage Kepler separates science from superstition, freedom from intolerance.
A small circus arrives in a coastal area of the North Sea: the place looks rather eerie and the audience is quite scarce. But despite all of this, the life of the performers is animated by feelings born under the circus tent, and which are often lived out in the secret of their trailers. The ballerina Angèle has an affair with Elliot, the company's clown who is tormented by his conscience; but she is also courted by Heroy, the circus director; he is a cruel and potentially dangerous man who is willing to win her over by resorting to the powers of the magician Zephyr.
We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.
Young Violetta and her mother Hannah are a peculiar couple. Ten-year-old Violetta lives a quiet life with her grandmother, while her mother Hannah is an unpredictable photographer who lives off of the generosity of others. When Hannah forces her daughter to pose as a model, Violetta finds her life with her loving grandmother turned upside down.The resulting pictures quickly become a sensation for the trendy 70's Paris art scene, and Violetta finds herself caught in between her new stature as an art muse and her dull childhood.
Separated at the birth of his mother who has only time to entrust to a member of his family, Guillaume de Villon, when he should have been killed, François will as well go to the ill-known taverns of the Latin Quarter that the Court of the Duke of Orleans, passing by the benches of the university. This marvelous poet at the same time as a scoundrel of morality will have a life where fights, robberies, imprisonments and final banishment will be linked. Leaving Paris, Villon will disappear.
A mid-level manager who develops an aversion to being "good" finds himself confronting the mysteries of middle-age and morality as he loses grasp of what was once his quiet life.
When Ahab's mother dies in childbirth, the infant's gruff father places his son in the care of his pious aunt. It is Rose who sparks the imagination of the young boy by teaching him to read the Bible, though when Ahab is reclaimed by his father a decade later the growing boy strives to become a hunter like his old man. Later, after Ahab warms to his father's lover Louise, the old man dies and the boy is sent back to his God-fearing aunt. Rejecting Rose and her abusive husband Henry's unforginv brand of discipline and infuriated that his aunt confiscated the locket given to him by Louise, young Ahab boldly stages his own kidnapping as an ingenious escape plan.
Merde (French for "shit") is the name given to an unkempt, gibberish-spewing subterranean creature of the Tokyo sewers, played by Denis Lavant, who rises from the underground lair where he dwells to attack unsuspecting locals in increasingly brazen and terrifying ways. He steals cash and cigarettes from passersby, frightens old women and salaciously licks schoolgirls, resulting in a televised media frenzy that creates mounting hysteria among the Tokyo populace.
In Paris, a young American who works as a Michael Jackson lookalike meets Marilyn Monroe, who invites him to her commune in Scotland, where she lives with Charlie Chaplin and her daughter, Shirley Temple.
Un camping au bord d'un lac pendant les vacances d'été. Camille, 17 ans, y traîne son ennui coincée entre ses parents et son petit ami. Elle rencontre Blaise, la quarantaine, tout juste embauché comme moniteur de voile. Camille et Blaise connaissent tous deux ce même mal de vivre qui les rapproche et les éloigne des autres. Mais leur complicité alimente la rumeur d'une liaison qui exaspère leur entourage et déchaîne les passions. Ils se lancent alors à corps perdus dans une dangereuse histoire d'amour...
In 1919, Mathilde was 19 years old. Two years earlier, her fiancé Manech left for the front at the Somme. Like millions of others he was "killed on the field of battle." It's written in black and white on the official notice. But Mathilde refuses to believe it. If Manech had died, she would know. She hangs on to her intuition as tightly as she would onto the last thread of hope linking her to her lover. A former sergeant tells her in vain that Manech died in the no man's land of a trench named Bingo Crepescule, in the company of four other men condemned to die for self-inflicted wounds. Her path ahead is full of obstacles but Mathilde is not frightened. Anything is possible to someone who is willing to challenge fate...
A group of artists, composed of the young actors Wilfried and Matthieu and the actresses Sophie, Mathilde and the dumb Jeanne, is hired by a millionaire, Axel de Fersen, to present a performance of Little Red Riding Hood in his isolated castle to celebrate the birthday of his grandson. Meanwhile, the police advises that a serial killer is raping and killing young women in the woods around that area. During the night, the group feels trapped and threatened in the castle, guessing who is and where might be the killer.
Foreign Legion officer, Galoup, recalls his once glorious life, leading troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, but the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind.
Set in a dilapidated indoor swimming pool (the Central Baths in Sofia), the film details the efforts of Anton, a clueless dreamer who yearns to sail the world, and Martha, the button obsessed cashier, to maintain the illusion for Anton's blind father that business is thriving. Working to sabotage their efforts is Gregor - Anton's brother - an amoral developer who is determined to raze the entire town and construct a sprawling condominium complex. Gregor engineers an accident that seems certain to doom the business and in the process steals away Eva, the beautiful woman of Anton's dreams. Will Gregor's dastardly plan succeed?
French novelist Vincent Ravalec made his directorial debut with this French drama about small-time crook Gaston (Yvan Attal) who poses as a millionaire after he picks up hitchhiking 16-year-old Marie-Pierre (Virginie Lanoue). Actually living in a seedy apartment, Gaston deals in stolen goods, but he soon climbs to bigger heists, including car thefts. Concealing his illegal activities, Gaston operates his company, Extramill, out of upscale, posh offices, while he and Marie-Pierre move into a sedate upper-middle-class neighborhood. Life is sweet, but the onset of paranoia, kinky sex activities, and police probes eventually culminate in violence.
Two Korean ex-pats in Paris are recruited by a French mobster. The duo find themselves at war with their mobster recruiters and each other.
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.
In 19th century, a disillusioned priest helps a young boy drifter who's a chess wunderkind to move on up in life and social structures using his talent. Years later, he's a success, but game of life and love has higher stakes than chess.
Set against Paris' oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, while it was closed for repairs, this film is a love story between two young vagrants: Alex, a would be circus performer addicted to alcohol and sedatives and Michele, a painter driven to a life on the streets because of a failed relationship and an affliction which is slowly turning her blind.
Mona is the girlfriend of Pierre, who is a member of a rather pathetic rock band in France. Their hero is the singer "Johnny Valentine " who, seeing that Mona is being neglected, decides to make her his own.
Al and Elsa have been a couple for some time, but the chances that their relationship will be long-lived are few. For one thing, Al is appallingly dependent on Elsa for his every emotional need. For another, Elsa is an incredibly elusive person, extremely difficult to pin down about anything - especially whatever is bothering her. How they have managed to survive this long is a cause for wonder. When Al gets an opportunity to be cast in a movie role, complete with no-cost occupancy in the casting agent's ugly but fashionable apartment, he jumps at the chance to provide a little material satisfaction for his beloved Elsa. But what exactly does she want?
A sexually transmitted disease called STBO is sweeping the country; it's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment. While a serum that can treat the disease has been formulated, it's been locked away in an inaccessible government building. A woman hires two men to steal the serum.
The movie starts with an interview with director Claude Lelouch. He pleads viewers not to disclose the plot of the movie after leaving the projection room. Even the movie's trailer shows only a long sequence of faces gazing speechlessly in space. "Like all my movies, this one is about a man and a woman", says Lelouch in the interview.
Paris by night. Alex, 22, wants to become a filmmaker. He is fascinated by first times and his girlfriend, Florence, has just left him for his best friend, Thomas. First break-up, first attempted murder: Alex tries to strangle Thomas, but gives up and wanders the streets. That evening, Mireille, a girl from provincial France who has come up to Paris to make commercials, is left by her boyfriend. Alex witnesses this separation. These two tormented souls run into each other at a party...
In 1942 in occupied France, a Jewish refugee marries a soldier to escape deportation to Germany. Meanwhile a wealthy art student loses her first husband to a stray Resistance bullet; at the Liberation she meets an actor, gets pregnant, and marries him. Lena and Madeleine meet at their children's school in Lyon in 1952 and the intensity of their relationship strains both their marriages to the breaking point.
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.
The story of Jean Valjean, a Frenchman convicted of minor crimes, who is hounded for years by an unforgiving and unrelenting police inspector, Javert.
The story revolves around the characters of Tess and Anatole. Barely of age, but not exactly adults, they still know nothing of love. Anatole sleeps wherever he is able while waiting for a stable job to come along, whereas Tess is about to start preparatory classes in Paris. They first meet in the surroundings of a port in decline, like a symbol of a country that is suffocating but which still has something to say. He has a tent, she has a car: together they will criss-cross the country’s roads and draw out the summer, to ensure they never forget.
Set in that environment that Popkhadze knows like the back of his hand, the action in “Blood Burn” kicks off when a pillar of the local Georgian community is murdered. His son Tristan, who aspires to become an orthodox priest, finds himself alone with his grieving mother. Then Gabriel, his older brother with a troubled past, returns from a long exile to try and make amends by washing away his family’s honor.
Maurice Sanders has a gift. He's a nipple whisperer. Once he was known as "Magic Sandy". But that was years ago, before Doris, a famous model and Sander's muse, fell ill. Now, after more than a decade, Doris wants to meet Maurice again.
Ida lives with a crew of five on a sailing yacht. During a shore leave in Marseille, the French Foreign Legion attracts Ida’s attention and she sets herself a new goal. Via Corsica, where the largest regiment of the Legion is stationed, the route leads to the Algerian town of Sidi-Bel-Abbes, which served as the Legion’s headquarter until the country gained independence in 1962. On their journey, Ida and her crew do not only breakthrough geographical borders. The past is reflected in the present, different languages seek their common ground, bacteria and fungi penetrate the film material and social hierarchies are reshaped. With every day of the journey, the different layers of narration become increasingly interwoven. The film traces connections and conditions that describe our present and therefore takes an example from the sea. As the origin of all life, the sea contains all information about it, but in the constant transition from one state to the next it can never be determined.
