Jean-Claude de Goros
Algeria, the 1930s. Younes is nine years old when he is put in his uncle's care in Oran. Rebaptized Jonas, he grows up among the Rio Salado youths, with whom he becomes friends. Emilie is one of the gang; everyone is in love with her. A great love story develops between Jonas and Emilie, which is soon unsettled by the conflicts troubling the country.
Famous TV news anchorman Pierre Nivel left Algiers for France in 1962. That's been a secret; his Paris co-workers have never known that he was formerly an Algerian pied noir. An Algerian delivers an urgent message to Pierre from a Leïla Jalal... Algiers, 1962. The Nivels live in the same apartment building as the Moslem Jalal family. Lycée student Pierre is in love with their daughter, Leïla. The civil unrest in Algeria is heating up and violence is spreading in Algiers. At school, Pierre is friends with a Moslem student, Issam, but he is made fun of for that... Pierre's jet arrives in Algiers. As a celebrity, Pierre is met on arrival by a government official, Nader Mansour. Because of the civil war raging between the government and Islamic terrorists, they drive into the city in a heavily armed convoy. Pierre does not tell Mansour his real reason for returning: Leïla has asked him to help her daughter Amina escape to safety in France.
In a desert town, sometime in the future, a repressive government regime restricts all forms of artistic expression. At night, Theo breaks the law, risking torture and death, to paint his work on public spaces. But when his lover Elia is arrested for committing the same crime, Theo allows himself to be captured hoping to somehow be reunited with her.
An apartment building caretaker with cannibalistic tendencies indulges in his passionate love for Lisa, one of the tenants.
Alice is a promising young artist in Paris. Her boyfriend Franck, a boxer, has just moved in to her attic flat. Then her sister Elsa, a bored housewife, leaves her unfaithful husband Thomas and turns up unannounced to stay with Alice and Franck. Elsa disrupts their life by playing psychological games with them, but they cannot bring themselves to throw her out.
Israel, 1967. Sacha and Laura have been living in a kibbutz near the Syrian border for two years. They are visited by Simon, Michel and Paul, three friends from Paris who have come to celebrate Laura's twentieth birthday. Simon is obsessed by the death of the girl he loved and during the birthday evening, attempts to find someone to blame amongst his friends. Laura alone knows that the young girl died of a broken heart. She also loved Sacha.
The young Ali, a second year law student, gets caught up in a student demonstration. The situation escalates, a cop is injured and witnesses designate Ali, of Arabic origin, as guilty.
An American film-star and an unknown British actress meet on set in Rome. She is angry when he refuses to speak to her journalist father, but later they have a passionate relationship.
The film follows a famous scientist who rules over his errant disabled daughter with an iron fist. He's meticulous and tyrannical, while she is impetuous but equally cruel in her own immature way.
"Cocktail Molotov" is the story of the adventures of this threesome, who reach Venice only to learn of the outbreak of the May 1968 disturbances at home. Once again, Anne, Frederic and Bruno realize that the important things of their time are happening somewhere where they are not. Swindled out of their car and virtually broke, they hitchhike back to Paris, hoping to arrive in time for some of the excitement.
A shady Parisian tries to take advantage of a family of French-descended Algerians forced to move to France.
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.
A remake and rewriting by director Bernard Borderie and scripters of a well-made 1932 film, this routine French drama seems a little outdated. The story has changed from a Russian officer who returns home from the war to find his wife has remarried, to a former paratrooper who tries to drive a stolen truck back from Morocco and suffers an accident -- and the same fate as the Russian. As a result of his injuries and the subsequent delay, the ex-military man is unable to get home as scheduled, and the woman he loves decides that he has left her. Once she "realizes" that supposed truth, she decides to marry her boss. As in the earlier film, one of the protagonists ends up in the French Foreign Legion and all three head toward a fateful meeting in a North African desert.
