After a long absence, Marie decides to return to the family home to introduce the partner with whom she is expecting a child.
After the closure of a lace factory in Calais, Andrée, Lulu and Solange are out on the street.
After the war, in Bucharest, a young Romanian poet arrested for having written an article denouncing Stalinist crimes, will save his life by accepting to become a hostage of the regime.
On her way to visit her childhood home in a colonial outpost in Northern Cameroon, a young French woman recalls her childhood, her memories concentrating on her family's houseboy.
25 year-old Hippo doesn't have a job, doesn't study either but lives from the money his younger brother earns with dealing and from occasional Poker winnings.
In Paris at night, a young aspiring filmmaker grapples with heartbreak after his girlfriend leaves him for his best friend. After a failed attempt to confront his friend, he wanders the streets and encounters a girl who has just been abandoned. Their paths cross at a party, bringing together two tormented souls.
For those who were young, living under the delusions of love and soft drugs in Paris, May 1968 - even if the guitar is still playing, they can't hear it any longer.
A mother and her son are secluded in their house on an isolated island where two moments of their lives will intertwine -youth and maturity- and where the bonds of their fragile but indestructible relationship are forged.
“I am a woman who does not know where she is going, but who, always, looks for beauty. As long as she does not flee me. Moritz, your beauty fled me. But I caught it and I carry it in me.”
A prize-fighter spends 16 years in prison for killing his wife during a blind rage. Upon his release, he wanders the grim streets of an empty French housing project in search of his now teen-age daughter. His quest forms the basis of this gripping French drama. Krim is the fighter and Yasmine his estranged daughter. Krim finds his old apartment block, but it is abandoned and slated for destruction. He is terribly disappointed, for all Krim wants right now is to be happy and to have his daughter back. He sends messages back to his friend and mentor in prison telling him how wonderful it is to be out of jail. His friend, Eugene, a lifer, isn't fooled for a second and is very angry at Krim for lying to him. Meanwhile, Krim stumbles across Nora, a teen-age drug addict, who could be his long-lost daughter. Eventually, he locks her in an abandoned flat and helps her get off the junk cold-turkey. It is a terrible scene, but he succeeds and the two begin a new kind of relationship.
80-year-old Thomas recounts his childhood and middle age through a series of flashbacks and dream sequences. Thomas believes he’s been taken away from a better life at birth; following a hospital fire, he vividly recalls being swapped with another new-born, and subsequently grows up in a poorer neighbouring household.
At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat outside.
A picture of humankind in Paris: singers, shows, social gatherings, businessmen, nightclub barmen, bums, shoppers.
A Private detective is hired to trace a woman who ran away and disappeared on her wedding day. The movie follows him and recounts the story of her life through her eyes and the eyes of those interviewed by the detective.
Laurent's fate is to be a soccer superstar. But he happens to fall in love with a Fabienne, 40. He is only 18, and his career is about to fall apart...
Aline Issermann's "Shades of Doubt" ("L'Ombre du Doute"), a French film about a wrenching family crisis, is set forth with remarkable restraint. The subject is incest, but the story's potential for tawdriness is never exploited. Instead, Ms. Issermann presents a discreet, methodical account of how 12-year-old Alexandrine comes to bring and then recant charges against her father, Jean.
A young woman comes to Roissy airport to pick up a military canteen that has been returned to her. It is the effects and pictures of Jean Péraud, a reporter photographer who disappeared at Dien Bien Phu on May 8, 1954. Soon, the discussion begins between the young woman and the former press companions of Péraud who are present. Through the memories and stories she provokes, the ever-present questions about what makes the war image resurface: is the reporter a witness or a combatant? Does he protect himself from the effects of war by filming it, or does he take more risks in order to bear witness? Can we speak of art in front of this image made in the face of death?
A young film director is making a movie with his friend Christa. In the film-within-the-film there are two couples, one real, one imagined, and the film - told through five dreams - is as much the story of a film in-production, as the birth of a child.
Quiet 16-year-old Louis, the high school headmaster’s son, has never been in trouble. His best friend, 18-year-old Greg, however, is his polar opposite: provocative, angry, violent, he has been kicked out of school for physically threatening young English teacher Camille. When Greg asks Louis to help him take revenge on Camille, Louis accepts, fascinated...
The middle of the 1970s. A photographer encounters an emaciated and brooding man with a hawk-like face. The man is called Viktor Atemian and this film is his story. He's a man who tries his hand at writing, meets with success, then falls upon hard times and ends up in the street.
An orange, yellow and gray film which tells a love story or more precisely the birth of the feeling of love.
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".
Rachel loves her life, her students, her friends, her ex, her guitar lessons. When she falls in love with Ali, she grows close to his 4-year-old daughter, Leila. She tucks her in, looks after her, and loves her like a mother... which she isn’t. Not yet. Rachel is 40. The desire for a family of her own is growing stronger, and the clock is ticking. Is it too late?
Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that 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.
Samuel Pierret is a nurse who saves the wrong guy – a thief whose henchmen take Samuel's pregnant wife hostage to force him to spring their boss from the hospital. A race through the subways and streets of Paris ensues, and the body count rises. Can Samuel evade the cops and the criminal underground and deliver his beloved to safety?
A bistro counter will decide the fate of two women. The first, Marie, the owner of a cafe for forty years in a Breton village, wants to realize her dream and go to the city. The second, Joelle, wants to leave town for the countryside.
Anna is a young teacher assigned as a substitute at a challenging middle school in the suburbs of Paris. In her class, Lakhdar, a well-behaved and promising student, has suffered a medical mishap and lost the use of his right hand.
An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the biblical Ruth) and her sisters, who are forced into exile after the death of their husbands. It is set in 1990s Paris, where the director was living in self-imposed exile following the ban on his 1982 documentary in Israel. The recurring theme of the film is migrations and unrooting, like the legendary Golem.
Katia, a 35-year-old researcher in a documentary production company, has a chaotic way of navigating her relationship with Fred, her boyfriend. When she takes part in a new project, she finally puts her difference into words – and this revelation will turn their life upside down.
Max, Paul and Simon have been friends for 35 years. They take great pleasure in their one vacation a year together without their partners and meet-up regularly to spend evenings drinking or playing cards. Each has a successful career and they all appear to have perfect lives until the night Simon announces to his friends that he has just strangled his wife, Estelle after a blazing row. Max and Paul are horrified by Simon's confession, but worse is to come when Simon asks them to lie and provide him with an alibi for the time Estelle was killed. Both men are torn between lying or turning over their best friend to the police.
Romantic drama in which a young woman must learn to live with her past in order to finally move forward.
A young woman travels to Moscow, speaking with the people she meets of the region's recent past.
A filmmaker and his crew try to enter the passionate world of Port-Royal and of Jansenism. Another Age of Louis XIV comes to life, the age of Pascal, Racine and of the “Friends of Truth”. The film itself comes up against the unanswerable question of grace.
Fabrice is an otherwise brutish truck driver who loves the disciplines involved in bicycle racing. He's no champion and doesn't appear to care much whether he wins any or not. In the crowded spaces of his world, the aloneness that comes with being a racer in training affords him a much-needed solitude and peace of mind. It's probably best for the people around him, too. In fact, it would be good if he could remain on his bike forever, because his nearly insane fear and distrust of others leads him to some pretty obnoxious behavior, especially with the women in his life.
Tom (8) and Benjamin (11) travel to Stockholm to spend the summer with their father, whom they have barely seen since he divorced their mother. Tom, in particular, knows next to nothing about this strange, solitary man who seems never to sleep. When he suggests they spend a few days at his cabin in the country, the boys are delighted. But the cabin is totally isolated in the middle of a huge forest, a place both beautiful and troubling.
In a fast-paced action film with an international backdrop, an unsuspecting Edith (Mireille Perrier) goes to Frankfurt to work for a German friend who is investigating some illegalities in the transportation industry. After Edith arrives, her friend leaves for Berlin, so Edith goes to stay at the house her friend shares with a second-generation German-Turkish woman. Meanwhile, Gordon (Bruce Thurman) is out photographing some journalists armed with video cameras who are spying on a wealthy honcho in the trucking business. He accidentally follows Edith and photographs her, then ends up saving her from some attackers. The dramatic action intensifies as questions arise about what certain trucks are carrying into Germany, what Edith's friend has to do with exposing the cargo on those trucks, and whether or not Edith will remain an unscathed, innocent by-stander.
The true story of a French teenager rising out of the underprivileged suburbs through love, education and rap music. Regis is a culturally gifted boy who dreams of success for his rap band, but he must accept drug money for the sake of his project. Discovering Islam and love, he bears with the harsh loss and paybacks of delinquency, until he finds the strength to express himself through music and slam-poetry and ultimately becomes a major artist of the French music scene.
Simon, a young German doctor who lives and works in Marseille, goes missing. His appartment is empty. His mother Valérie is desperate. She doesn't understand the reason of his disappearance. Therefore she asks Jens, Simon's former boyfriend, to come to Marseille and help her find him.
La Patinoire is about a film director who is shooting a highly symbolic film called 'Dolores' at an ice rink. He has hired a Lithuanian ice hockey team with which he is having enormous communication problems. His actors all have inflated egos, his film crew is made up of fools, and there is a politician on his back. But he must finish the film, no matter what, in time for the Venice Film Festival.
This certificate was formerly obtained by pupils at the end of primary school. The teacher of a small village has a dream: he wants his son to get his certificate and to be the best in the district ("Canton"). His younger son is less gifted: he is ashamed of him and treats him like a dunce. His obsession is so strong his marriage (his wife is a schoolteacher too) is soon on the rocks.
Marion, a 50 year old woman, suddenly ups and leaves the man with whom she has been living for the past 20 years; she has found herself, midlife, in love with her friend Claude, another woman.
Joa (Bulle Ogier), an archaeologist from Mexico, comes to Paris in search of her sister Anna (Mireille Perrier), of whom she is suddenly without news. Anna, a theater actress, was in the title role in Sade's "Justine" when she disappeared. The investigation leading Joa to the people who have known her sister, turns into an initiatory quest. Her journey, her stroll through a subterranean marginal Paris, leads also to the emergence of a new woman.
A single mother gets entangled in a web of lies to protect her sons.
This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.
Angela was 8 years old when the first McDonald's opened in East Berlin - Since then, she has been fighting against the curse of her generation: to be born "too late" at a time of global political depression. Coming from a family of activists, her sister chose the world of business and her mother abandoned overnight her political struggle to move alone to the countryside.
Otto and Anna, a brother and sister in their twenties, separated by the divorce of their parents, live on two continents. The vagaries of life keep them apart.
Algerian journalist Sahafi is faced with a dilemma. If he returns to Algeria, he's almost certain to be assassinated. If he takes political asylum in the Netherlands, he is treated like a pariah.
Camille, a young idealistic photojournalist, goes to the Central African Republic to cover the civil war that is brewing up. What she sees there will change her destiny forever.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Territorial dispute have always been in the center of most human conflicts. The territorial notion thrives for possession and power, resulting in invasive actions and occupation. UIP is the abbreviation for "United Israel Palestine". It is a title referring to a possible future scenario for Israel and Palestine set in the year 2027. In this scenario the international society, governed by the United Nations, is the new occupational power and therefore an international court administers the conflicts. Through this court the film unfolds and it is from a juridical perspective that all territories, bodies, ownerships and legacies are viewed. In contrast psychological relations, both private and public, appears painfully clear.
Emmanuel, 37, lives in Paris with his wife, Irene, and his daughter Anne, 14 years old. He accidentally discovers that Irene is receiving mail in the remaining mail. She refuses to follow Emmanuel to Italy where he has to write a biography of Filippo Lippi. Distraught, Emmanuel decided to leave immediately for Florence.
At the end of June in Paris: Mireille accompanies his friend Thomas, a solitary and restless being, during a walk to Père Lachaise. Thomas is very agitated, worried. He confides to Mireille that he wishes to be cremated in the event of death. In September: after a period of holidays, Mireille returns at her home. She and his friends do not any more manage to contact Thomas. After investigation, Mireille learns that Thomas died in August, only. As he has no family his body was interred in the square of the needy of the new cemetery of Thiais. Mireille wants to honor the last wills of his friend, but the law is strict: to dig up the body and cremate it, the services of the city hall have to have the signature of a member of Thomas's family. Mireille learns that Thomas had a younger brother, Melchior. But But the young man, marginalized, abandoned for years by his older brother, refuses to sign the licence to dig up.
Freshly landed in Paris, Daniel Laurençon, who calls himself Netchaïev, who was believed dead five years ago in Gibraltar, warns a commercial center of a bomb attack a few minutes before its completion.
With an off-beat sense of humor to match its erratic central character, this original comedy-drama features Jean-Philippe Ecoffey as Yves, a young man who works as a cop at night. The catch is that Yves turns to petty crime during the day, partly to impress Aurore (Aurelle Doazan), a nurse he idolizes from afar. His criminal hobby seems hard to understand, since it's doubtful that they will really get him anywhere with Aurore; besides, she already has a boyfriend. Nevertheless, Yves starts out by robbing a post office and ends up trying to run over Aurore's boyfriend, an act which finally gets him into serious trouble.
In this creatively organized story of one "delinquent," director Patrick Chaput has put together a well-paced drama/thriller set in part against the dark by-ways of Paris. Seventeen-year-old Daniel grew up in foster homes in a rural area and those years contrast with his later youth in Paris. A filmmaker opts to interview Daniel for a documentary on delinquency, and that is how the young man's past and precarious present start coming to light.
A portrait of three women striving to forge their own rosy paths.
2029. The Baudrier family, the heads of a pharmaceutical empire, are preparing to flee to Patagonia, a land that has been spared. Aimé Baudrier, the heir son, opposes the departure, while in the night a mysterious commando approaches.
Algiers, 1938. Meursault, a quiet and unassuming employee in his early thirties, attends his mother's funeral without shedding a tear. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie, a work colleague. He quickly slips back into his usual routine.
Two patients meet in the waiting room of their mutual psychoanalyst’s office. Martine, brave and resilient, has been fighting cancer for years. Alexandre, desperate, cannot recover from the departure of Julien, his great love. Together, they wait, comfort each other and forge a unique bond. But above all, they wonder why their psychoanalyst didn’t keep his appointments that day.