France

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I’m Going Home (French: Je rentre à la maison, Portuguese: Vou Para Casa) is a 2001 French-Portuguese film written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira.

Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) is a grand old theatre actor who receives the shocking news that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car accident. As time passes, Valence busies himself with his daily life in Paris, turning down unsuitable roles in low-brow television productions and looking after his 9-year-old grandson. When an American filmmaker (John Malkovich) miscasts him in an ill-conceived adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Valence finds himself compelled to make a decision about his life.Read More »

Three siblings, a father and a grandmother run a business in the form of a travelling puppet show. When the father dies, the remaining family members try to keep his legacy alive.Read More »

Based on the 1967 novel by Canadian author Timothy Findley, THE LAST OF THE CRAZY PEOPLE is a French naturalist drama from director Laurent Achard. Martin is a young boy growing up in a family on the brink of collapse, the story is presented from his perspective as he passively watches it slowly crumble around him.Read More »

Plot: François, perpetual rebel against society and its laws, is released after a long imprisonment, and meets up with his family and friends in Lyon. His new love for Maria, a young woman adrift, prompts him to get quick money. François will commit acts of violence that will definitely lose him.Read More »

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La Cambrure (The Curve) is a short film shot in video, directed by Edwige Shaki who also wrote the scenario. Éric Rohmer was a technical advisor and editor for the movie. Despite being directed by Shaki, some of Rohmer’s trademarks, extensive dialog and beautiful young actors, including Shaki herself, are present. Edwige Shaki later was an actress in the Rohmer film The Lady and the Duke.

…a student falls in love with a young “pictorial” woman…Read More »

February 6, 1998. Ajaccio. The prefect Claude Erignac is murdered and the French anti-terrorist task forced arrest a group called “Anonymous”.Read More »

Late 17th Century: Anne de Grandcamp and Lucie de Fontenelle, two little girls from Normandy, arrive at the Saint-Cyr school founded by Madame de Maintenon for educating the daughters of impoverished nobles ruined in wars and making them into free women. Madame de Maintenon is the secret wife of Louis XIV, and empowered by his support, she offers “her” two hundred fifty girls a playful and avant-garde education. Anne and Lucie, two inseparable friends, allow themselves to be carried away by the promise of a bright future. But Maintenon has arrived at the pinnacle of power through scheming and debasing herself and she now fears the fires of hell. She is counting on her model school to atone for her past sins.Read More »

PLOT: A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris.Read More »

Bresson’s brilliant adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story (A Gentle Creature) exhibits in its lapidary sequences the political and existential revolt of a young student in Paris. Sharing a theme that can be traced from Bresson’s Mouchette to his fantastic exploration of revolutionary choices in The Devil Probably, Une Femme Douce articulates in its inimitable minimalist mode a range of issues from the ideological options of France post-May ’68 to human relationships. Dominique Sanda is not the conventional, recognizable student revolutionary, but a “gentle” philosopher whose powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny exceed and tease the prosaic, crude disposition of her bourgeois husband. The sequences in the zoo, the museum of natural history and the performance of Hamlet are powerful. On another note, look out for Indian experimental filmmaker Kumar Shahani who was assisting Bresson at this time, sitting diagonally behind Sanda in the sequence at the movie theater.Read More »