Quote:
Amin, an aspiring screenwriter living in Paris, returns home for the summer, to a fishing village in the South of France. It is a time of reconnecting with his family and his childhood friends. Together with his cousin Tony and his best friend Ophélie, he spends his time between the Tunisian restaurant run by his parents, the local bars and the beaches frequented by girls on holiday. Enchanted by the many female characters who surround him, Amin remains in awe of these summer sirens while his dionysiac cousin throws himself into their carnal delights with euphoria. Armed with his camera and guided by the bright simmer light of the Mediterranean coast, Amin pursues his philosophical quest while gathering inspiration for his screenplays. When it comes to love, only Mektoub (‘destiny’ in Arabic) can decide. This coming-of-age saga set in 1994 casts a nostalgic glow on the wonders of youth. -Curzon Artificial Eye

3.10GB | 2 h 53 min | 1024×428 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/A07C07C5F59F58E/Abdellatif_Kechiche_-_%282017%29_Mektoub%2C_My_Love_Canto_Uno.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/44E8DDD7381CD2E/Abdellatif_Kechiche_-_%282017%29_Mektoub%2C_My_Love_Canto_Uno.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/ACAEA91036A64AC/Abdellatif_Kechiche_-_%282017%29_Mektoub%2C_My_Love_Canto_Uno.part3.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/ACF295619D69226/Abdellatif_Kechiche_-_%282017%29_Mektoub%2C_My_Love_Canto_Uno.part4.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/F0B362AABC04AA1/Mektoub.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
The story of Saartjes Baartman, a Black domestic who, in 1808, left Southern Africa, then ruled by Dutch settlers, for Europe, following her boss Hendrick Caesar , hoping to find fame and fortune there. Once in London her master turned manager does nothing but exhibit her as a freak in a phony and humiliating carnival show. After a series of troubles caused by their act, Caesar, Saartje and their new friend, bear-tamer Réaux, head for Paris where once again, and against her will, she has to mimic savagery and expose her body, first in carnivals, then in the aristocratic salons of Paris, later on among the libertines and finally in brothels where she ends up being a prostitute. In the meantime, French anatomists will have taken an interest in her unusual anatomy (enormous buttocks and labia) only to declare her the missing link from ape to man. In 1815, aged only 27, she dies alone, of a combination of pneumonia and venereal disease.

3.27GB | 2 h 45 min | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/76F01695F0274CE/Venus.noire.AKA.Black.Venus.2010.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:French, Afrikaans, English
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – Vénus noire AKA Black Venus (2010) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.

Quote:

Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as “Water and Air” or “Heaven and Earth.” If the movie was a tough sell in the United States, it was not because of poor distribution or because no one wanted to see two and a half hours of French Arabs eating and talking and eating and crying and eating and dancing but because that title made the movie sound like a documentary about the keys to harvesting wheat. This bursting drama is something else entirely, a gripping, multigenerational saga that brings you as close as you could hope to get to an aching, dreaming extended family. It begins like Ken Loach and ends like Tolstoy (and thus clearly deserves a title that puts you somewhere other than aisle seven at Trader Joe’s).

But The Secret of the Grain it is. And what a primal sneak attack. You couldn’t know from the serene opening minutes, set on a tourist ferry headed toward the French resort town of Sète (whose screen lineage dates back at least as far as Agnès Varda’s 1956 La Pointe Courte), that we’d end up where we do 150 or so intense minutes later, engulfed in bad news that feels like good news. Locationally, it’s not far from where we began. Emotionally, it’s another universe.

Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche was born in Tunisia in 1960 and, at six, moved to Nice with his family. Later, he did stage work and studied acting. This training accounts for the vivid naturalism of the performances in his movies, which all take as their subject the Arab immigrant experience in France. With all due respect to the actorly achievements in the films of De Sica, the Dardennes, and the other great realists, the men and women in The Secret of the Grain talk to one another with more ease and fire and exasperation than is usual in realist films, which even at their most devastating can be predicated on an emotional austerity. This is not an imitation of life—it’s the rumbling real thing.

Kechiche’s three movies thus far—Blame It on Voltaire (2000) and L’esquive (2003, better known in the U.S. by its glibber title, Games of Love and Chance) were his first two—sidestep overt confrontation. The woe, racism, loneliness, rage, and indictment we’re used to seeing in the films of sympathetic European filmmakers exist here, but the frothing at the mouth in, say, Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine or the intellectual seething in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown are upended. Identity is nearly always political, but Kechiche is daring and imaginative enough to show us what can happen when it’s ever so slightly depoliticized. The amazing trick of Blame It on Voltaire is the way in which its protagonist, Jallel (Sami Bouajila), a Tunisian immigrant pretending to be an Algerian political refugee for the asylum, feels less foreign in France than many of the Parisians he meets. The Secret of the Grain plays that disjunction along the fault lines of class and generation, yet Kechiche resists staging an earthquake. The movie is essentially a portrait of an extended family whose dynamics are steadily reframed in a collection of long, eventful scenes.

For the cast of The Secret of the Grain, this provides an authentic relief: they get to play actual people—not symbols, inmates, nannies, or the undignified other. And their concerns have little to do with overt oppression or xenophobia. They have dreams and talents and passions—and a taste for the ruminative anecdote. (Some of those dreams languish, but they’re there all the same.) Their Frenchness is itself complex. Kechiche probably suffered the hassles and humiliations that come with being brown in a white world. But what’s so refreshing (and necessary) about each of his films is how comfortable his characters are in their own skin. The Secret of the Grain is full of interracial couples and mixed babies. The lack of societal exclamation is remarkable. See, the sky doesn’t fall.

As the film opens, Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) is fired from the shipbuilding job he’s had for forty years. It’s a demonstration of Kechiche’s artistic priorities that Slimane’s firing is for the crime of care and thoroughness. He wants to make art; his boss wants him to make product—the difference is irreconcilable. Rather than do nothing, Slimane, who moved to France from North Africa, decides to open a restaurant on an otherwise useless old boat he’s inherited. That endeavor provides the movie with the narrative trunk from which its joys and sorrows sprout. Slimane is aged and flawed, and in the way that old men want to leave behind memorials that right their mistakes, he sees this restaurant as a legacy for his four children, some of whom hold out hope that he will get back together with their mother. His most engaged business partner is Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the twenty-year-old daughter of his current girlfriend and landlord, Latifa (Hatika Karaoui). Rym’s not much older than Slimane’s two youngest kids (in one of the movie’s many nicely offhanded motifs, the younger son quietly lusts after her while the daughters roll their eyes), but it’s she who makes the presentations for the various loans and licenses required to pull the venture off.

The launch of the restaurant becomes a family affair in which the two sides of Slimane’s life reluctantly mix. Latifa is miffed that Slimane would center his establishment around the recipes of his intimidating, short-tempered ex-wife, Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk). In Slimane’s defense, Latifa is rumored to be an atrocious cook—Souad’s couscous and fish are legendary.

Narrative in this film is secondary to human nature. These are characters who appear to behave and emote independently of what Kechiche has specified on the page. He directs with a grand transparency, and his movie thrives at the cross streets of realism and melodrama. The film alternates between long scenes of entrepreneurial process (an attempt to explain, for instance, to various bureaucrats how great it would be for Sète to have authentic North African cuisine) and even longer dinner sequences, featuring most of the Beiji clan, that deepen the character dynamics in about a dozen ways. These passages are lengthy, but they’re constantly alive. Take the first weekly dinner: unofficially, it begins when Slimane, freshly sacked, drops off the fish at Souad’s. Things get cooking later with the arrival of a son here and some friends there, until every seat at the big table is taken. Before the food is served, the conversation tends toward the mundane (diapers!); during dinner, it moves on to the divine, such as the blatantly sexual joys of the Arabic language. There is also the occasional urgent sidebar. The eldest daughter, Karima (Faridah Benkhetache), wants to know what brother Majid (Sami Zitouni) is thinking, leaving his high-strung Russian wife, Julia (Alice Houri), alone with her thoughts and their newborn. (Perhaps he’s thinking about the other woman he had sex with in the movie’s opening scene.)

As the camera makes its way around the room and past the heaping plates of food, with the sun yet to set, you can see in the diners’ faces the degrees of satisfaction one can get from having a good meal with beloved people. But there’s also the attendant sadness in Souad’s face—just beneath her temper—when Slimane’s name comes up. This stoic woman misses her ex (as much as, we find, Julia misses her husband). By this point, we’ve entered a completely emotionalist realm. Kechiche is one of those special talents who can use the camera to make a character’s inner life robustly cinematic. We feel their passions because he situates us right next to them—we might as well be guests at their table.

The movie builds to the restaurant’s soft opening, designed to curry favor with local bigwigs, bureaucrats, and businesspeople, who, in a vaguely self-congratulatory way, seem to be rooting for Slimane. It’s a fraught situation that lasts for a suspenseful forty minutes. Who knew a missing meal, a room full of hungry white people, an old man chasing a motorbike, and a desperate but committed belly dance could make you sweat like this? Kechiche watches patiently as his realism comes to a boil. This movie is as much a thriller as The Wages of Fear or Blood Simple.

Right before things take an unexpected turn and that eleventh-hour belly dance comes to the rescue, the film launches a subtly damning, comical cultural critique. Majid’s white mistress happens to show up, in her business capacity, for Slimane’s opening night, and her modest Arabic impresses a tablemate, who exclaims, “Very hip!” Meanwhile, some neighborhood restaurant owners in attendance worry that the down-home-ness of Slimane’s place will be hard to beat. Most of these exchanges are presented as though overheard from a table away.

Once that belly starts undulating, the restaurant’s white faces look up, drunk and delighted. In this complexly conceived and realized moment, the dancer uses sex and cultural exoticism to distract tables of formerly civilized but suddenly restless white natives. Slimane’s daughters watch with a mix of personal envy and ethnic shame. But Kechiche invites us to acknowledge a fundamental truth about Arabs—or any people of color—in the history of the movies: stereotypes sell. It’s an astounding scene, even aside from the suspense that inspires it in the first place. Kechiche’s ideas of ethnicity, enterprise, and canny self-exploitation are conscious. Compare them with the institutionalized racism of a movie like, say, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, where Western hyperactivity and faux sensitivity are grafted onto India like Teflon onto a pot. The Secret of the Grain literalizes the tension between a Western hunger for exotic entertainment and an Arab’s willingness to feed it. The movie comments on a political power dynamic that seems lost on filmmakers like Boyle.

As with every other sequence in this film, those last forty minutes are a triumph of excess over restraint. The stakes are astronomical for everybody. The fingerprints of Kechiche the storyteller are evident on some of the action—we knew Majid was a knucklehead, but his running off is a bit preposterous, even if his selfishness is not without reason. Then there’s the final shot, the genius of which lies in its shock. On the one hand, your heart breaks; on the other, you’re exhilarated. Following such an abrupt ending, there remains a morbid curiosity about the morning after, its tears and recriminations. Who will blame whom? Who will feel they are to blame? Will these events destroy the family or unite it? So many questions need answering, so many issues beg for resolution. But that last shot leaves you with the unexpected high of tragedy, not its cruel hangover. Anyway, by that point Kechiche has so thoroughly worn you out that you couldn’t possibly stand another minute. What we’ve just witnessed—in all its eruptive glory—is movie enough.

Wesley Morris is a film critic at the Boston Globe.

https://nitro.download/view/89BC2D79B0CD8B8/Abdel_Kechiche_-_(2007)_The_Secret_of_the_Grain.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – La graine et le mulet AKA The Secret of the Grain (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The sensation of the Cannes Film Festival and the most controversial film of the year, Blue is the Warmest Color made cinema history as the first film ever awarded the Palme d’Or to both its director and its actresses. In a star-making role, Adèle Exarchopoulos is Adèle, a passionate young woman who has a yearning she doesn’t quite understand until a chance encounter with the blue-haired Emma ignites a flame and brings her to life. Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris) gives a fearless performance as Emma, the older woman who excites Adèle’s desire and becomes the love of her life. Abdellatif Kechiche’s (The Secret of the Grain) intimate epic of tenderness and passion charts their relationship over the course of several years, from the ecstasy of a first kiss to the agony of heartbreak. Pulsing with gestures, embraces, furtive exchanges, and arias of joy and devastation, Blue is the Warmest Color is a profoundly moving hymn to both love and life. ~ ifcfilms

Adèle is a sensitive fifteen-year-old student when we first meet her. She is, essentially, an ordinary kid, until she realizes that her sexual desires turn more towards her own gender than the boys who ask her out. After meeting a blue-haired stranger, the confident and assertive Emma, Adèle soon finds herself tentatively visiting gay bars, and, shortly thereafter, wrapped in the arms and legs of her new lover, enjoying the delights of first love. ~ tiff

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/0D7551D8A8DF4C2/la.vie.d.adele.aka.blue.is.the.warmest.color.2013.bdrip.xvid.rar

Language:French
Subtitles:Serbian, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Arabic, Farsi/Persian, Vietnamese, Indonesian

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – La vie d’Adèle aka Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Winner of the Golden Lion for first feature, Poetical Refugee is the story of Jallel, a North African immigrant in Paris. Claiming to be a refugee from war-torn Algeria in order to get residency, his life in the country of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is one of homeless shelters, illegal jobs, assumed identities and emotionally complex sexual relationships. Director Abdel Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and has worked for many years as an actor in France, refuses to portray Jallel as either hapless victim or angry rebel. Instead, he focuses on Jallel’s interpersonal relationships with his new community-not ghettoized North Africans, but an eclectic group of unemployed French and second-generation immigrants struggling to survive. Here, it is the wounded who heal the wounded, and Jallel, in spite of his own traumas, becomes a healing force for the emotionally troubled women whose lives intermingle with his. With superb performances by Sami Bouajila (Bye Bye), Aure Atika and Elodie Bouchez (The Dream Life of Angels), Poetical Refugee offers a moving and tender portrayal of life on the margins.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/44C06422ABC7512/Blame.It.on.Voltaire.2000.DVDRip.x264-SMz.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/906871682390055/Poetical_Refugee_%282000%29.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – La Faute à Voltaire aka Blame It on Voltaire (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Filmed in a reformed train Wagon, sueur follows the performance as a belly
dancer of The secret of the Grain lead actress, Hafsia Herzi, who dances on
hot and popular musics.

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	45mn 10s
Size: 	1.45 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x720 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 415 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/A843AB9870E8062/Sueur.2008.720p.BluRay.x264-PHOBOS.mkv

Language(s):Arabic, French
Subtitles:English

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – Sueur (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

the film presents a group of kids – mostly of arab descent – in the “cit?s” (us= projects) who stage the marivaux play of the same name.

at the Istanbul International Film Festival/, it also took the international critics’ prize and a special jury prize for the ensemble acting. Kechiche was awarded a special jury prize at the European Film Awards for his first feature, La faute ? Voltaire (also highly recomended, if you can find it.)

someone at imdb writes: This movie is getting fresh exposure in France thanks to its win at Les C?sars, or the “French Oscars” as other countries like to call them. Its success will probably mean that it now gets exposure outside the country, too, and I wonder how successfully.

Though an accurate and contemporary examination of France, the film’s world is a foreign one, even to many people living here–the specificity of the setting (the projects, in a “suburb” of Paris), the language (rapid-fire, slangy, “vulgar”, and peppered with “verlan”, a street language of inverted syllables–the word itself could translate as “wardsback”, and how anyone will translate this dialogue I have no idea), and the behavior (mostly arguing–strident, pushy, beautifully repetitive) may not play clearly outside of France. I’m not sure how clearly it plays here, or how willing people are to watch it, especially as it turns the idea of the scary bad French projects somewhat on its ear.

This isn’t a criticism of the movie; on the contrary. Kechiche has shot a riveting cross-section of teenagers growing up in social housing, in broken homes and poverty, who lack the tools of expression, and who have adopted the posturing of the wounded (and, in the story, almost entirely absent) adults who raise them, attacking (the movie unfolds at a near-constant level of verbal aggression) and dodging (“esquiver” means “to dodge” or “to evade”) one another’s attacks with all they can muster.

The film’s intensely political side feels almost accidental; in its unfolding, it has great heart, and its actors, who are apparently mostly amateurs from around the shooting location, are outstanding. On the whole, it reminded me a great deal of David Gordon Green’s George Washington: a simple love story set against a landscape of poverty, played out frankly and honestly, allowed to unfold at a distinctly un-Hollywoodian rhythm. If Green’s film is more beautiful cinematic ally, L’Esquive is more concentrated, more unflinching in its examination of the deep repercussions and violence of economic, social, and familial hardship. Its statement that France is no longer a country of the French-of-French-ancestry, and that its refusal to accept its own transformation does not mean its lost generation accepts its loss, could not be more clearly nor more poignantly made.

Without spoiling or going into detail, there are things about the plot that are implausible, things that probably hurt the film overall, but watching this movie for plot is like watching Ocean’s Eleven for social insight. This is a positive study of character in a bad situation, of a stratum of society rarely filmed and still more rarely treated as fairly as it is offered up here, beautifully and eloquently.

1.79GB | 1h 59m | 716×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4F3AE5AA06FBDAA/Abdellatif_Kechiche_-_(2003)_Games_of_Love_and_Chance.mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Abdellatif Kechiche – L’esquive AKA Games of Love and Chance (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.