France

Ainsi Va La Vie (2019)
A portrait of three women striving to forge their own rosy paths.

The film was produced in 2019 by Nobuhiro Suwa as an commercial for a cosmetics brand called ALBION. It was once on YouTube, but now the link is downRead More »

Tendres cousines (1980)
With the outbreak of WWII, the sudden call to arms will send the men of a family’s estate to the front, leaving a curious adolescent alone with the remaining women of the house, in need of a warm embrace and, possibly, a daring kiss.Read More »

“For Jean-Luc Godard,with all the admiration and affection of
Jacques Perconte and Nicole Brenez,December 3, 2020.”

At the end of October (a few days before my birthday actually) Nicole Brenez asked me to produce a small film for a great man, a short film, a film like a birthday song, a common gift. Of course, I go for it, although I wonder how I could do something like this. That JLG sees one of my films, that he tampers with it and uses it is a blessing, a huge honor, but it’s quite another thing to send him images, to make a little film for him, so humble the gesture be it … Nicole Brenez sends me many portraits that she likes very much, some are historical documents, others images made by JLG himself. She also sends me documents, films, recordings. An incredible amount of stuff for a month of immersion. The birthday is December 3. I don’t know why, but I immediately wanted to grab my camera and take JLG to a screen on a boat, for a ride in the port of Rotterdam (where I live). I have tried several times to express this intuition. I wanted to film.Read More »

Theatrical cut (13 minutes longer than TV cut, and has no TV bug markers).

Stanley Kubrick’s mark on the legacy of cinema can never be measured. He was a giant in his field, his great works resembling pristine pieces of art, studied by students and masters alike, all searching for answers their maker was notoriously reticent to give. While he’s among the most scrutinized filmmakers that ever lived, the chance to hear Kubrick’s own words was a rarity—until now.Read More »

Quote:
“I survived because they liked my paintings,” says Vann Nath in this unsettling documentary, an affecting and effective film. This placid artist was imprisoned along with 17,000 other Cambodians in a Phnom Penh high school that had been converted into a Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture center. The school was used for this purpose for two years during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror (1975 to 1979), when as many as a million people died. In the film, he returns there to confront the men who worked as guards, really boys doing the Devil’s work: at the time, they ranged from 13 to their early 20’s. At one point the director shows the former guards recreating their grisly everyday tasks as a kind of pantomime. Watching them re-enact their chores in the large, stained and now empty rooms, which look like those in almost any American high school – while piles of the dead prisoners’ abandoned clothes sit heaped nearby – is simply one of the most disorienting moments you’re likely to encounter in a movie. – Elvis MitchellRead More »

In a large building in a Parisian district, Elsa lives alone. Her young neighbor Alice hears her playing the piano at home and enjoys it. Elsa suggests that she learn the piano and offers to play it at home, when she is not there. Alice thus gets into the habit of living in Elsa’s apartment several times a week.Read More »

Quote:
June 1944, France is still under the German occupation. The writer and communist Robert Antelme, major figure of the Resistance, is arrested and deported. His young wife Marguerite Duras, writer and resistant, is torn by the anguish of not having news of her and her secret affair with her comrade Dyonis. She meets a French agent working at the Gestapo, Pierre Rabier, and, ready to do anything to find her husband, puts himself to the test of an ambiguous relationship with this troubled man, only to be able to help him. The end of the war and the return of the camps announce to Marguerite Duras the beginning of an unbearable wait, a slow and silent agony in the midst of the chaos of the Liberation of Paris.Read More »

Based on Guitry’s own stage play about a sanctimonious fellow who eventually’s victimized by his own hypocrisy. Little effort’s made to “cinematize” the property, which’s filmed just as it was staged.Read More »

After being left for another man by his wife, Charles Bellanger raises his only son to fear and suspect women. Years later, such an education is bearing fruit.Read More »