France

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NOTHING TO HIDE is an idependent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument. The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers.

NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.Read More »

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The newly appointed CEO of a giant European investment bank works to hold on to his power when an American hedge fund company tries to buy out his company.Read More »

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In the years between Je tu il elle and her fourth feature, Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), Chantal Akerman had become an art-film sensation, thanks to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Her ultimate expression of the reassurance and anxiety of routine and her most evocative visual exploration of space and time, Jeanne Dielman tied Akerman’s distinct long-duration camera approach to a challengingly drawn-out narrative of domestic confinement. Made with an entirely female crew and focusing on the stultifying household routines of an isolated woman, it was hailed in Europe and America as possibly the greatest, purest feminist film ever made, even if Akerman insisted that was not her intention.Read More »

Two young women, marginalised by society, go on a destructive tour of sex and violence. Breaking norms and killing men – and shattering the complacency of polite cinema audiences.

Baise-moi (Fuck Me) is a 2000 French thriller film written and co-directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi and starring Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla Anderson. It is based on the homonymous novel by Despentes, first published in 1999. The film received intense media coverage because of its graphic mix of violence and explicit sex scenes. Consequently, it is sometimes considered an example of the “New French Extremity”.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
Bertrand Tavernier’s personal journey through French cinema, from films he enjoyed as a boy to his own early career, told through portraits of key creative figures.

Embark on an cinematic experience with writer-director Bertrand Tavernier’s personal voyage through French cinema. Tavernier explores the auteurs from the 1930s up to his own first breakout feature in 1974, The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

Included in the analysis are the contributions of directors such as Jacques Becker and François Truffaut and actors such as Jean Renoir and Jean Gabin balanced with those of lesser known French filmmakers who have also illuminated emotions and revealed surprising truths. Hundreds of clips comprise this magnificent tribute to French filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors, and musicians with rare and behind the-scenes insights that are eye-opening, scandalous and funny.

Tavernier’s dissection draws a reference line to the influences of American cinema at the time.Read More »

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Iris is twenty years old and works on the assembly line of a fizzy drink factory. One day, she loses the tip of her ring finger in an industrial injury, leading her to quit her job and move to the port city nearby. Wandering the town, Iris comes across a laboratory of a very peculiar kind, where she is engaged as an assistant. Clients come in regularly, bringing with them all sorts of personal belongings they want processed and preserved forever in the laboratory. Without fully grasping what is at play around her, Iris gradually engages in a disturbing love affair with her enigmatic employer.Read More »

A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother.
The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes.
Eugène Green drops biblical motifs – Abraham and Isaac, Mary and Joseph – into this genuinely contemporary setting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, augmenting them with nods to crime films, Italian Baroque music, a Doisneau photograph, three 17th century paintings and an artificial way of speaking that is anything but current.
The characters are positioned within the visual compositions and look directly into the camera, their diction flawless. Whatever needs saying – and that’s a lot – they recite impassively, in declamatory fashion. Along the way, there are jabs at the literature milieu and trendy yuppies.
A film where divine seriousness rubs against bizarre comedy, where theology meets caricature, an intriguing film, anachronistic and innovative in equal measure.Read More »

Summary from wikipedia:
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Amok is a 1934 French film, directed by Fyodor Otsep. The director was nominated for the Mussolini Cup at the 1934 Venice International Film Festival. The movie centers on a physician, Dr. Holk, in a small Dutch colony in the tropics. A strange illness, known as Amok, is turning innocent people into madmen. When a young woman, Hèlène, comes to him asking for an abortion so that her returning husband will not know she has been unfaithful, he refuses. Hélène seeks help elsewhere, leading Dr. Holk to try to find and save her before it’s too late.Read More »

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Détective is one of Godard’s most engaging films, even though it has not been one of his most celebrated. Wheeler Winston Dixon described it as a “straightforward commercial venture,” the film Godard made “precisely in order to direct Je vous salue, Marie (1985).” But dismissing it in this way fails to recognize that, even in a film where Godard is forced to compromise, there is still much to be recommended. While Détective does tell a story of sorts, it is more than a mere narrative film. It still has many of the striking sound/image experiments and investigations into the forms, textures and affects of the plastic and temporal arts that we have come to expect from a Godard film. It also has a playful comic energy. In fact, as Dave Kehr notes, Détective has “all the lightness and zip of Godard’s sixties features.” Read More »