Pierre Léon
It could have been a normal day for Virgile, but that's not the way it turned out. After being the victim of a strange attack, the young man is then forced to share a dressing room with Robert Lesmur, the main actor of the play in which he plays an extra. A disturbing character, Robert stimulates feelings in Virgile that will quickly overwhelm him.
North of Italy, the von Ketten dispute the forces of the Episcopate of Trent. Herr Ketten seeks marriage in a distant country, Portugal. After their honeymoon journey back home, Ketten leaves again for the war. Eleven years elapsed… Rumours are running about the presence of that 'foreign' in the castle. Some say she's a heretic. Until one day, the Bishop of Trento ends up dying and, with the signature of peace, falls the background of von Ketten's life. Will the Portuguese win, where death seems to be moving in?
Two film directors and a writer are in Portugal for an expedition through various images, moments from the history of Western allegorical representation. The writer is Jean-Louis Schefer, and this tale encapsulates his life’s mission.
Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.
Workplace drama doesn’t get any messier than in this intriguingly knotty tale of corporate backbiting and buried secrets. Nora (Agathe Bonitzer) is a bright young professional whose new job at a financial firm turns out to be a trial by fire when she learns that her bosses (Lambert Wilson and Pascal Greggory) share a tumultuous history with her prickly mathematician father (Jean-Pierre Bacri). Meanwhile, an interoffice romance with a competitive colleague (Vincent Lacoste) leads to even more complications, leaving Nora to navigate a minefield of delicate relationships as she climbs the corporate ladder. Isabelle Huppert costars and delivers a typically multi-layered performance as one of many sharply etched characters populating this complex moral tale.
Thirty years old, a nothing job, a timid love affair: Rémi is a little at sea in his life. Until the day when he must share it with his double, another him, invasive and not so nice. Which one will be the true Rémi?
Created at irregular intervals, Pierre Léon’s small oeuvre oscillates between experimental home movie and theatrical mise-en-scène, found footage and documentary assemblages. PHANTOM POWER is a kind of sum of these rich and lavish efforts, a poetic series of cinematic fragments, an inventory of his cinematic output. What unfolds between russian folk songs and Ingrid Caven’s singing, between micro-dramas and found footage, is the poetic world of this wayward and still unknown artist, whose discovery and recognition is long overdue. - Viennale
Balibar, well-known as an actress and singer, left none of her talents unused in her directing debut. In this eclectic homage to Greek tragedy, Balibar and Léon are free of any convention. With a cameo by Barbet Schroeder.
Bye Bye Blondie tells the tale of Gloria and Frances, who first met when they were both patients in the same psychiatric hospital back in the 1980s, and decided to run away together. At the time their love affair was defined by youthful intensity. Later, when Francis disappeared without a trace, Gloria mourned the loss with a heavy heart. Over 20 years later, Francis (Emmanuelle Béart) and Gloria (Béatrice Dalle) have both turned 40. They've taken very different paths in life, with nomadic Gloria spending most of her time in a dive bar, and Frances enjoying success as a popular Parisian TV personality. The wife of a closeted and successful novelist, Francis is locked in a mutually-beneficial marriage of convenience when she once again crosses paths with Gloria, and finds her comfortable world turned upside down.
A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris.
Léon uses images from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible to reflect upon the 2010 beating of young cineaste Joachim Gatti by police and the economically vulnerable members of French society. - Film Society of Lincoln Center
Léon returns to Dostoevsky to film an episode from The Idiot, starring Jeanne Balibar as the femme fatale Nastassia Philippovna, who finds herself juggling the affections of four men over the course of a single evening. One is her benefactor, the bourgeois Totsky (film historian Bernard Eisenschitz). Another is the opportunistic Ganya (Serge Bozon), whom Totsky has promised 75,000 rubles if he will marry Nastassia. Enter Rogozhin, who offers Nastassia 100,000 rubles for her hand. And of course, the “idiot,” Prince Myshkin, who loves Nastassia madly and vows to “save” her. Shot in elegant black-and-white with a peerless cast, The Idiot distills the power of Dostoevsky’s great novel into a singular hour of cinema.
During the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud), a young woman whose husband is away fighting at the front, receives a short letter of break-up from him. Distraught, she decides to go to join him, but is driven back by the rule of the time which forbids women to move around alone. She has no other recourse than to dress herself up as a man so as to be able to take to the road on foot. As she lives near the Western Fromt she hooks up with a passing group of French soldiers without too much trouble. But there's something a bit odd about these stragglers, and it's not just their habit of bursting into song at every opportunity.
The film is a love story which tells the impossible tale of two youths who have never before met. The action unrolls in Paris between 1979 and 1980.
Marianne, a young cellist discovers that her father had a mistress who is still alive. Her journey to find this mysterious woman takes her to places and people from her childhood that she thought she'd left behind forever.
Pierre Léon ingeniously condenses and updates Dostoevsky’s novel about a 19-year-old intellectual reconnecting with his estranged family in his impressive debut feature.
Elegantly and carefully, Léon trains his sights both on Chekhov’s famous play written in 1896 and on its earlier, lesser known version entitled "The Wood Demon" (1889), combining the two.
Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield suddenly decide to abandon their suffocating universe. They embark on a trip around the world in search of an impossible sanctity.
Two sons, Pierre and Vladimir, question their father, Max Léon, about his biography in a domestic environment. What could be a simple family chat expands to the complex dimensions of history, since his life is that of a certain destiny, first involved in the resistance, then as a major activist in the Communist Party. The two archivists widen the circle to listen to the testimonies of their mother, Svettlana, their sister, Michèle, and other witnesses, comrades in utopia: Jacques Rossi, a former Komintern agent deported to the Gulag, and Marina Vlady, who lived in the USSR in the 1930s and was the wife of the protest singer Vladimir Vyssotsky. History is filtered through conversations that do not exclude silence or questioning. – FIDMarseille
