Joana Preiss

Paris Je T'aime

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

Close to Leo

When 21 year-old Leo, the oldest of four brothers, announces to his rural French family that he's HIV positive, his family quickly rallies around him. Leo travels to Paris with his youngst brother Marcel for treatment. When Leo tries to push his brother away to protect him, the love and loyalty of the two brothers is tested.

The White Line

Jean, a respected theater actor, leads a dissolute life. Separated from the mother of his child, he devotes most of his time to work, alcohol, and women. Sylvain in full adolescence, feels the need to get closer to his father. On a whim, both of them leave to join an old friend of Jean, Bob the American, who lives on an isolated ranch. From then on, they will try to apprehend each other, with clumsiness, hesitation and sometimes even violence.

In Paris

After a love affair ends badly, a young Parisian named Paul sinks into the same kind of deep depression that led his sister to kill herself. He moves back home with his father and aimless brother Jonathan but refuses to get out of bed.

The Unpolished

Stevie, a precocious 14-year-old girl must cope with the instabilities of her immoderate parents. When they decide to move to a small provincial town in Germany, Stevie attempts to slip into a normal life. Whilst her parents playfully escape their responsibilities, Stevie tries to make a good impression in town, spreading stories of grandeur and claiming to be the daughter of a diplomat. She makes progress. Yet the good weather doesn’t last and before long, she discovers that her parents have once more resorted to illegal means, as a way of supporting their leisurely lifestyle. As friends and hangers-on of her parents fill their new home, the chaos continually mounts. It is in this atmosphere of physical and emotional destruction, that Stevie must now start to define herself and perhaps even break free.

Ma mère

After his father's death, a young man is introduced to a world of hedonism and depravity by his amoral mother.

Accomplices

Two police detectives investigate the murder of a high-end male prostitute, and his relationship with his girlfriend.

A Perfect Couple

A French couple has been living in Lisbon for years, and they return to Paris for a friend's wedding. They announce to another friend they are having dinner with that they are going to split.

The Man After

A couple faces the difficulties of creating a life together and find happiness. Should Suzanne run away from her man to be at peace? Would a new lover help her find herself?

Bad Girl

Louise simultaneously discovers that she is pregnant and that her mother is seriously ill. Happiness and guilt, euphoria and sadness, filial love and love, period. She'll need a good nine months to cope with all this.

Sibérie

Filmed entirely by Preiss and her then lover, Dumont, mostly in the claustrophobia of a train car on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Siberia is an intense and raw observation of a relationship’s denouement. With unflinching honesty and a Direct Cinema approach, Preiss’s documentary is a fascinating psychological exploration of love, dependency, and the bounds of romantic privacy.

Hip Moves

Hervé is a lonely man who lives only for his self-defense courses. Fired from the zoo where he works because he depresses the animals, he becomes a night watchman in a factory. To pass the time, he watches the comings and goings of a strange pair of lovers: his colleague and his wife who sells her body with her husband's blessing.

Mary, Queen of Scots

The life and death of the Scottish monarch.

Clean

After she ends up in prison and loses custody of her son, a woman struggles to assimilate outside her former life and remain clean long enough to regain custody of her son.

The French Trilogy

The French Trilogy showcases a series of 62 photographs taken by Philippe Terrier-Hermann with 25 actors in 6 French regions echoing his previous project, The American Tetralogy. Questioning the relationship between cinema, landscapes and representations, this project features a song by Edward Barrow and was visible in public space in France during the summer of 2013, through a distribution system borrowing from advertising strategies.

La nuit sera longue

It is the story of a prohibited and perverted identification: how an eight-year-old boy, entrusted to the care of his mother since the separation of the parents, meets and looks at his father, all day long.

LOL (Laughing Out Loud)

Lola is a striking teenaged girl who is on the cusp of adulthood and longs to rush into the adult world of independence, freedom and sexual exploits, but is tenaciously held back by her mother.

Portrait of the Artist

A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters. But what he doesn't show to anyone, not even his wife, is the mark on his back that keeps getting bigger. This red mark worries him, upsets him, and seems to want to tell him something...

Raw

In Justine's family everyone is a vet and a vegetarian. At 16, she's a gifted teen ready to take on her first year in vet school, where her older sister also studies. There, she gets no time to settle: hazing starts right away. Justine is forced to eat raw meat for the first time in her life. Unexpected consequences emerge as her true self begins to form.

Passer l'hiver

A gas station. Two women. Winter. Trips. Daily life. And then a risk. The hotel in Normandy. A step aside. The investigation. The red Lada. The beach. The death that works the living. A movement and a suspension. The brown girl. The love. A story of links that are woven.

Rouge

A companion to the director's Le Dos Rouge/Portrait of the Artist. A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters.

The Wake

Over there, in his village at the foot of the mountains, he’s dead. His face radiant and his body at peace, he lies on the bed. Then they can gather around him. Three days long they talk, drink, weep, fight and remember… And they smile, too.

The Full House

Antoine, a bachelor party-goer, gets new roommates: Jeanne and her two children.

Alien Crystal Palace

A scientist finds the secret that predispose to the formation of the ideal couple. With this new alchemy, he achieves a pioneering experience: the creation of a perfect androgynous.

Silent Asylum

A film director interviews Burmese refugees about their experiences encountering oppression and cruelty in their homeland, and reads aloud poetry about the destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bomb.

Noise

Footage from 2005’s Festival Art Rock in Saint-Brieuc, France, featuring Metric, Sonic Youth, Jeanne Balibar, and other acts.

Boarding Gate

A beautiful woman, Sandra, seduces a wealthy businessman, Miles Rennburg. Little does he realise that she has been sent to kill him at the behest of her boyfriend/crime partner, Lester. Controlling all this is Sue, Lester's wife.

Which Is Witch ?

Louis II de Barrière has been petrified in the ice since the dawn of time. We find him in a forest, luckily he is alive ! Three witch sisters try to defrost it and unravel its musical mystery. We are propelled with them in a colorful and surreal fairy tale.

Felix in Wonderland

Fall into the world of Felix Kubin's experimentation and creation of music sound and his mastering of his instrument of predilection, the KORG MS20. A portrait of a great artist who never stops living with music in his head.

Broken Poet

Broken Poet is a compelling investigation into the meaning of success, rock stardom and even freedom itself which, as Janis Joplin sang, is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Jour et nuit, delle donne e degli uomini perduti

Portraits of women, stories from their past and their present as prostitutes working between Italy and France (and Brazil). Women who used to think they were lost, and men just as lost as them.

Hotel de l'Univers

“Why did you kill her?” Lou asks Philippe again. The life-odyssey of Joana, a modern-day Moll Flanders, continues as she moves through different times and places, like the stations of a personal via crucis, with occasional leaps into the present. From Paris to Rome and on to São Paulo. The body has lost every value, except the economic one.

Resurrection

The film is a rendition of Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last novel. It begins with a reading of the beginning of the first part in Naples, in September 2012. It moves on to Berlin, Locarno 2013, Oneglia, Paris, Casalborgone, and it ends in Milan with the beginning of the second part. The places and times change, and so do the people doing the reading. But also, in the middle, real people and voices surface, like Adamo Vergine at his home and Jean François Neplaz in Marseilles. The film searches for the possible faces of Tolstoy’s two protagonists in Oneglia, Procida, and Casalborgone.

Home Sweet Home

A young woman wanders down an endless corridor, while other people knock at a door at night. A man takes a picture of Montmartre, two women hand him some money, while a patron manages from rue de Mhyra a network of Italian call girls. Adiba sings an ancient Moroccan song in a room full of children, while Vidya is performing her daily puja in Pune (India). Giuli sings to herself as she drives at night through Turin and runs to the station at day. Parallel stories where every character is caught “in a situation,” closed.

Trilogy of Our Lives Undone

Our feelings, our choices, even our death wander on the web like options, like ghosts. For the time of a last train journey, for the time of a love chat, a deadly chat, or an unlikely casting, three generations will try to definitively wrest from virtual nomadism, to put an end to self-exile that undo our lives... Between Rotterdam and Tourcoing, diving in the Flatlands, tenuous and fragile...

The War in Paris

In Paris, in 1943, Jules, a 19-year-old Jew, lived without an ideal, tossed about by circumstances. He becomes in turn a traitor then a hero. Thomas, his fifteen-year-old brother, wants to act and fight in resistance.

Late August, Early September

A book editor juggles relationships with two women while coping with his best friend's terminal illness.

Paris Je T'aime

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.