France

A young woman moves to Paris with a disastrous past. When she becomes a woman and thinks she’s finally free from her past’s shadows, some characters show up and she gets the chance to become a unique heroine.Read More »

On November 20, 1979 at 5:30 AM, hundreds of armed men take over the Grand Mosque of Mecca, transforming the holiest shrine of Islam into a fortress and a trap for almost 100.000 pilgrims inside. This is the beginning of the SIEGE OF MECCA.Read More »

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Franck Poupart is a slightly neurotic door-to-door salesman in a sinister part of Paris’ suburbs. He meets Mona, a teenager, who’s been made a prostitute by her own aunt. Franck would like to change his life and also save Mona from her aunt. Murder is the only solution.Read More »

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On April 27, 1937, in the midst of a grueling and increasingly brutal Spanish Civil War, the
ancient Basque town of Guernica was subjected to an extended duration bombardment
campaign by German forces in an unrelenting aerial campaign designed to demoralize the
collective psyche of the Basque nation and to also show camaraderie (and military
alliance) with the nationalists under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.Read More »

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Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (or Howling Wind, per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily Brontë’s famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism. This is one of Rivette’s most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film’s tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating’s haunted house melodrama played straight.Read More »

A distinguished drama and considered an important entry in French cinema’s new naturalism from one of the ’80s most promising French filmmakers, this drama presents a shocking but humanistic look at the tragic lives of impoverished children living in the Paris projects. Bruno is a teenaged boy who has just moved into a high-rise project with his hard-working mother.Read More »

Synopsis
Comedy: After French yuppie Arthur Vlaminck has graduated at the National School of Administration he joins the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. Vlaminck’s ambitious new colleagues try to bully him around while his superior Claude Maupas acts on the other hand rather phlegmatic. Somewhat surprisingly Vlaminck’s career gains momentum.Read More »

Jean Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators travel to France to perform a reverse ethnography of late-1960’s Parisian life.

Icarus Films wrote:
By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronicle of a Summer, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Little by Little, Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators Damoure Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.Read More »

How does a fiction writer turn to documentary essays to confront horror in times of emergency and shock? The Tokyo subway attack, orchestrated by members of the Aum cult in March 1995, profoundly impacted Haruki Murakami’s life and transformed him as a writer. In the months that followed, he collected testimonies from victims and some members of the Aum sect. His essay Underground was an attempt to explore the deeper causes of the tragedy, beyond the superficial media coverage. This work ultimately inspired one of his most internationally renowned novels: 1Q84Read More »