France

Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:

In early twentieth-century Brittany, two peasants marry, have a son, and live in traditional Breton ways: three generations under one roof, a division of labor between the sexes, elders’ stories at night, politics and religion during their little free time. Times are hard: la Chienne du Monde drives some to suicide; Ankou (death) is close at hand. Pierre is born into this republican family, his lyric childhood interrupted by the outbreak of war and his father’s conscription. He learns his catechism and, as a child of a Reds, also reveres school. His grandfather and father often put him on their shoulders, giving him a ride on the horse of pride.Read More »

In Chris Marker’s Studio by Agnès Varda is a rare and beautiful moment in cinema where two friends — who happen to be pioneering, legendary filmmakers from the French New Wave — meet in real life and in a virtual world. In the film, which was shot at two points between 2009-2011, Agnès Varda visits Chris Marker in his studio, a few years before his passing. She admires his magnificent mess, snooping around for details that reveal “the hidden side of Marker’s work”: a labyrinth of wires and computer equipment, a collection of images, magazines, and books, and — of course — cats. The film takes on a wonderful surrealist turn when Varda creates an avatar to meet Marker’s avatar in the online virtual world of Second Life.Read More »

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »

Pierre Tardieu, a day laborer, lives with his sick father. Reminiscing about his childhood with his mother on the beach, he can’t free himself from her. Murdering someone becomes the only way of realizing his existence. One day, he meets a pianist called Laure in a bookstore and falls in love with her.Read More »

As the awkward, insecure bubbly Gaby, Lolita Chammah suggests a Gallic Greta Gerwig in one of her not-quite-formed-adult roles. Upon arriving in the country, she’s promptly discarded by her boyfriend, and as solitude is not an option, the companionship-starved Gaby seeks out a replacement. She finds it in Nicolas (Benjamin Biolay), a seemingly hirsute vagabond whose shack she invites herself to share. Director Sophie Letourneur’s follow-up to 2012’s Les coquillettes is a tentative pastoral romance filled with endearing neuroses and an organically unpredictable plot, charming and moving in its investigation of why it is that some simply cannot bear to be alone.Read More »

Quote:
… explores Claude Lanzmann’s dedication to his film Shoah. It uses Lanzmann’s own words and previously unseen footage to provide new insights into his groundbreaking work.Read More »

The Lily in the valley is the story of an impossible love between Felix de Vandenesse, youngest of an aristocratic family, and Madame de Mortsauf, the virtuous wife of the Count de Mortsauf, a dark and violent man.Read More »

Synopsis :
The evolution of life, from the drop of water where hundreds of microscopic animals live to that of the great primates. Essential behaviors (feeding and reproducing) are innate, automatic, and never show any variation. The struggle for life and interspecies aggressiveness are found in all animals, with significant differences. The ancestors of the great primates learned to anticipate the outcome of their actions and to assess the risks they needed to take in order to survive…Read More »