France

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Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth.Read More »

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Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.Read More »

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The adventure of a young university student confronted with love and the Quebec separatist movement of the 60s. Denis Héroux, who directed this film while in university, says, ”I realized my strongest characters, those who oriented the film almost against my will, were ardent separatist, sometimes even terrorist. But I was stuck with them and had to continue following them.”Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
Lenz leaves England and returns to Paris in search of Madeleine who disappeared in uncertain circumstances. He meets Helena, a nurse still struggling with the loss of her infant son. Thus begins a fevered love story set against a backdrop of sorrow, passion, jealousy and self-destruction.Read More »

Review from senses of cinema:
Pick any recent book on documentary and you’re likely to find mention of Chris Marker’s oeuvre, usually characterising him as an essayist or even perhaps a poetic ethnographer. While there is some truth to this what most commentators have avoided recognising is Marker’s chameleon-like shift from photography to film, film to analogue video, analogue video to DV, and more recently from DV to multimedia. In retrospect, Marker would seem to be less the filmmaker and more an explorer and creator of audiovisual memes, of the passages of memory and reverie that lie somewhere between the usual stuff of documentary and what another age might have called ‘fancy.’Read More »

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The film is part of the television series “La culture en chantiers” (“Culture under Construction”). In the form of a video letter, this film goes up the Seine. Starting with the traces of the Normandy landing of the Americans, it ends in Paris in Jean Genet’s hotel room. It is a voyage made to meditate on the “state of things” in a clear and melancholy way—the mutations in cinema and the media in the year of the Gulf War, in the company of Serge Daney and others.Read More »

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Those who still think the biopic is a boring and routine genre have an unbeatable occasion to let Boro in the Box change their minds. The life of Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, director of films like Contes immoraux or La bête, always halfway between eroticism and fantasy, is imagined by Bertrand Mandico as an oneiric and surreal black and white journey, from Poland to Paris, where Borowczyk wanders around foggy landscapes coming across all kinds of incredible situations. An extremely evocative work, ideal both for fans of Borowczyk and lovers of sensitive, irrational cinema.Read More »

A behind-the-scene account of the porn world and its stars as they’ve never been seen before – and the no-holds-barred portrait of a true giant.

Rocco Siffredi is to pornography what Mike Tyson is to boxing or Mick Jagger is to rock’n’roll: a living legend. His mother wanted him to be a priest; with her blessing he became a hardcore performer, devoting his life to one God only: Desire. Rocco Siffredi reveals all, even if it sometimes means busting his own myth: his true story, beginnings, career, wife and children… and the ultimate revelation that will change his life forever. A behind-the-scenes account of the porn world and its stars as they’ve never been seen before – the no-holds-bard portrait of a true giant.Read More »

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In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ’60s. It is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad absurdum”.) Every fragment of reality (e.g. polling booths on voting day) comes through the lens as a pre-fabricated televisual cliché. And, as always, Ruiz detonates his own auteur status.As an essay-film, Great Events contains many echoes – and a cheeky critique – of the sophisticated political filmmaking of Chris Marker. But Ruiz increasingly spices up the lesson with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles and gestures.Read More »