France

Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge), first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d’Orsay, tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse. Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It’s a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou’s starting point–dictated by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which commissioned the film–is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.Read More »

Synopsis:
David is an accountant. He leaves town every Friday, pretending he is going to take care of his parents at their old people’s home. But actually his parents are dead, and he spends the week-ends converting a chalet. He intends to live there with Lise, a woman he knows and loves since childhood. But Lise has just married another and has a baby. David’s mad love does not see those facts as an obstacle…Read More »

Toto est un marcassin accueilli par Madeleine. La bête va grandir, dans les cœurs, mais sur ses pattes aussi. Vincent affectionne les singes, dont il part retrouver les facéties en Inde. Et le pauvre Joseph souffre de cauchemars causés par la machine artificielle à respirer qu’il est contraint d’utiliser. C’est Pierre qui se trouve à nouer toutes ces aventures. Pierre Creton, ouvrier agricole et cinéaste, qui vit à Vattetot, et qui retrouve ici la veine de L’Heure du Berger (Grand Prix FIDMarseille 2008). Autrement dit avec l’autobiographique teinté de fantastique, avec l’extraordinaire pêché dans l’ordinaire, avec l’affection et l’amour portés aux êtres, humains et animaux confondus, avec l’humour saupoudrant chaque amorce de drame. Read More »

Synopsis
A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying “Mortal danger”. Read More »

Synopsis:
At nearly 80, Agnès Varda explores her memory – growing up in Belgium, living in Sète, Paris, and Noirmoutier, discovering photography, making a film, being part of the New Wave, raising children with Jacques Demy, losing him, and growing old. She explores her memory using photographs, film clips, home movies, contemporary interviews, and set pieces she designs to capture a feeling, a time, or a frame. Shining through each scene are her impish charm, inventiveness, and natural empathy. How do people grow old, how does loss stay with them, can they remain creative, and what do they remember? Memory, she says, is like a swarm of confused flies. She envisions hers for us.Read More »

Quote:
Beirut, My City finds Saab and her collaborator, the playwright and director Roger Assaf, returning to the shell of her former home following Israel’s 1982 invasion, finding small glimmers of hope in the chaos of refugee camps and the rubble of decimated neighborhoods.
“I consider this to be my most important film, the one that is the closest to my heart. In 1982, my house was burning. That’s not nothing. It was a very old house. 150 years of history went up in flames and disappeared. All of that is suddenly destroyed. The family home, wiped off the map, gone from the city, having become a pile of ruins.”Read More »

In her first fiction feature Twelve Thousand [+], screening in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival, French director Nadège Trebal points her lens on two complex and irreverent characters who will stop at nothing to defend their freedom. Starring the director herself, alongside an intense Arieh Worthalter, the characters of Twelve Thousand seem to float above a world that’s intent on taming them.

After losing his black-market job in a breaker’s yard and believing that his partner Maroussia could never love him like before, Frank ups and leaves in a bid to earn the same amount that Maroussia makes in a year: twelve thousand euros. No more, no less; the bare minimum required.Read More »

Storyline
What do you dream of when you’re 16 years old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can’t get a bigger kick than dying. And that’s why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself. -ImdbRead More »

In this visually stylish comedy, Angele is an attractive woman just edging into middle age who is looking for companionship without commitment. Her co-worker Samantha has more boyfriends than she knows what to do with, and Marie, the youngest of the group, is still learning the ropes of love.Read More »