France

Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé reveals his passion for cinema, Africa and the world to Cambodian director Rithy Panh.Read More »

A young Jew in 19th-century London, Esther Kahn is so disconnected with her surroundings – hardly speaking, emotionless – that she seems retarded. Unhappy among her poor tailoring family, she yearns for the stage. Only there does she engage with life.Read More »

In Southern Tunisia, Mattéo, a local who lives off the generosity of his listeners as he spends his time telling stories in the streets of Sfax, falls in love with a prostitute, Safia. She gives up her profession and they move, Matteo working at the port, in a house on the edge of the desert in which Mattéo’s father (the Maltese) live. But Safia being pregnant, Mattéo gets involved with a gang of gun smugglers, hoping to earn more money to provide for his family. But Matteo doesn’t come back and Safia belives him dead. Matteo’s father kicks her out of the house and she meets André, an archeologist who falls under her spell and she accepts to follow him to Paris. Three years later, out of jail, Matteo goes to Paris, hoping to find his beloved Safia and their child.Read More »

Simple is 26 but he has the intellectual abilities of a three year old. Simple is handicapped. Since the death of his father, he lives with his mother and his younger brother Kléber. But when their mother dies in a car accident, both teenagers are left to their own devices. Kléber is going to take his big brother under his wing but for the two young people life is not a chimera.Read More »

Quote:
Ombres chinoises was produced for the French TV magazine Juste une Image, a monthly show which in its almost three years of production cataloged all kinds of visual experimentations: from Muybridge to the latest computer animation of the New York Institute of Technology. I.N.A. asked for Ruiz’s participation for the April 1982 show. He decided to produce Ombres Chinoises (probably a project that was wandering in his mind long before), a catalog of dramatic situations acted out by Chinese shadows with voice-over narrations (depositio: actually, as Torrent notes below, these are only voiceovers in the technical sense. The “tragic situations” are represented through shadow, puppetry, and dialog not narration). Nothing comes closer to the Ruizian aesthetics. After the first dramatic situation, titled “enigma,” a panel reads:Read More »

This work is the result of a montage of the director’s filmed diary, material he has filmed for nearly ten years.Read More »

The director, a French veteran of the Indochina war (La 317e Section), returned to follow a platoon of American soldiers for six weeks at the height of fighting in Vietnam in 1966. The documentary discusses the background and fate of the soldiers and emphasizes how much American culture pervades the soldiers’ behaviors in the midst of jungle life and fighting.Read More »

Three women in a Marseille apartment gets stuck in a heat wave. They find themselves trapped in a terrifying affair and longing for freedom.Read More »

The Pig, was shot in one blustery day on a small French farm in the Massif Central. Two separate camera and sound crews carefully recorded the slaughtering, dismemberment, and evisceration of a pig and its subsequent conversion into sausages. Eustache, perhaps more than any other French filmmaker, made it his business to get as much of French culture down on film as he could, and here he records a practice that has all but vanished in the face of industrialization. One of Eustache’s most beautiful films, the work is also notable for its vivid sound track, alive with the thick, unintelligible patois of the farm workers.Read More »