France

9 Fingers opens like in a film noir: at night, in a train station, a man called Magloire runs from a police control. With no luggage and no future. No sooner has he found a huge amount of money than trouble begins. A gang on his heels will soon make him a hostage then an accomplice. It is Kurtz’s gang. After an aborted break-in, they all have to flee aboard a cargo ship with a dangerous volatile freight. Nothing happens as it was supposed to be – poison and madness contaminate everybody. Kurtz’s men seem to be the pawns of a conspiracy led by the mysterious “9 Fingers”…Read More »

• Portrait of François Truffaut
This excerpt from Serge Leroy’s 1961 documentary François Truffaut shows the newly celebrated filmmaker discussing his influences and beginnings along with Les Mistons and The 400 Blows.

from the Criterion DVD

Portrait of François Truffaut is a a twenty-five minute excerpt from a 1961 documentary by Serge Leroy, covering the director’s early years. Truffaut does plenty of talking about the creative choices and influences that went into his first films, while fidgeting restlessly in a chair before the camera, with overlong clips from his first few films mixed in.

from DVDBreakdown.comRead More »

Synopsis
Frédérick’s passion in life is growing trees, but for sixty years he has been cultivating something more potent than plant life – a dark secret. Only his wife and his son know the truth about his past. After his son’s death, Frédérick realises that he must now let the rest of his family in on his long-kept secret…Read More »

CAST: Ovidie, Alissiya, Leyla Bentho, Grégory Dorcel, Rocco Siffredi, Ron Jeremy, Mike South, Tera Patrick & Stoya

The wonders of internet has made the shady industry of pornography rich, but is now in death cramps due to the piracy ruining the market and forcing the participants to perform more extreme sex.

With her background and experience in the field, the former French adult film star, director, documentarist, and feminist, Ovidie, investigates the current state of production and distribution of pornography, as the once lucrative adult film industry is in rapid decline more than ever before. Without a doubt, a lot has changed since the advent of the multitude of free online sites, or “tubes”, and the crash of the omnipotent DVD market in the mid-2000s, and nowadays, performers earn less while being forced to shoot more and more challenging scenes. But, with a rampant piracy and nearly no profit at all, who is the one who benefits?Read More »

For over 20 years Sophie Calle’s work has taken the form of photographic installations and chronicles, whose structure and form reflect a narrative approach – both within themselves individually and, taken together, in terms of Calle’s own career. Born in Paris in 1953, Calle’s early work dates from a world trip in the 1970s that lasted seven years. During a stay in California in 1978 she took her first photographs – graves marked Father and Mother – with no professional intent, she simply had come upon something that ‘her father might like’. On her return to Paris she began tailing unknowns in the street as part of a conscious ‘drifting through the city’, recording the results in notebooks containing photographs and texts.Read More »

Inspired by Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s On Terrorism and the State. Shots of the orbital road, the Arc de Triomphe and rebellious blindfolded youths in a gunfight.

In-between essay and fiction, La dernière énigme established Ossang’s formal territory: a contemporary mythology. Inspired by the book On Terrorism and the State by Gianfranco Sanguinetti, it evokes visual echoes of political events, where a generation forfeits all revolutionary aspirations due to state terrorism. Shot using two cans of Kodak XX 16mm film.Read More »

Synopsis
Paris, 1817. The wealthy Countess Ferraud is distressed when she begins to receive letters from her husband, Colonel Chabert, who was reported to have died during the Napoleonic wars ten years before. After an attempt to have him committed to a lunatic asylum fails, the now destitute Chabert appeals to a lawyer Derville to help restore his identity and his fortune. The Countess has since remarried and has no intention of surrendering the wealth she inherited from Chabert…Read More »

Quote:
The world after the atomic age. An engineer disappears, together with his consortium (Kryo’Corp) and his discovery: a new energy source powered by the fusion of two primary substances. Ulysses, Kryo’Corp’s heir, organises an expedition to the only place these substances occur.Read More »

May 6, 2012. Cable news reporter Laetitia is covering the French presidential elections, while Vincent, her ex-husband, demands to see their two young daughters. It’s a manic Sunday in Paris : two agitated girls, a frazzled babysitter, a needy new boyfriend, a grumpy lawyer and France cut in half!Read More »