France

Having been caught stealing money from his employer to pay for a holiday with his girlfriend Juliette, Michel finds himself in a prison cell. He falls into a deep sleep and awakes to find the door of his cell open. Stepping through the doorway, he finds himself in the most beautiful sun-drenched countryside. A peaceful country road leads him to a remote village whose inhabitants have lost their memory. Husbands and wives no longer recognise one another but everyone seems to know Juliette when Michel enquires about her…Read More »

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Astrid, the wife of a renowned lawyer, has been silenced for 25 years. Her family’s equilibrium suddenly collapses when her children start looking for justice.Read More »

Chiara is an actress and daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. One summer, she decides to live like her father. She dresses, speaks, and breathes like him with such conviction that others start calling her “Marcello”.Read More »

Martha, an eighty-year-old former Canadian dancer, has been living in Paris for decades. Now losing her head, she is threatened to be sent to an old people’s home. No way. Martha decides to call her niece, Canadian librarian Fiona, for help. Alas, when her relative arrives in the French capital, Martha has disappeared. Worse, Fiona loses both her identity documents and money after falling into the Seine. Now alone in Paris, the young woman is desperate. It is at this point that Dom, a homeless man who lives in a tent on the Île aux Cygnes, unexpectedly comes into her life…, for better or worse.Read More »

Dr. Valois has invented the “flashage”, a cure for depressed people. After having tested it on monkeys, he tries with a first human patient, Alain Durieux. This is great success, everybody’s happy except may be Alain’s wife, Jeanne, who’s worrying about the changes in Alain’s personality.Read More »

William Klein moved into more blatantly political territory with this hilarious, vicious Vietnam-era lampoon of imperialist American foreign policy. Mr. Freedom (John Abbey), a bellowing good-ol’-boy superhero decked out in copious football padding, jets to France to cut off a Commie invasion from Switzerland. A destructive, arrogant patriot in tight pants, Freedom joins forces with Marie Madeleine (a satirically sexy Delphine Seyrig) to combat lefty freethinkers, as well as the insidious evildoers Moujik Man and inflatable Red China Man, culminating in a star-spangled showdown of kitschy excess. Delightfully crass, Mr. Freedom is a trenchant, rib-tickling takedown of gaudy modern Americana.Read More »

The cease-fire declared on October 21, 1976, gave the Fedayeen the opportunity to reclaim this area—Fatah territory until it was abandoned in 1970—from the right wing militia. But Syrians and Israelis joined together to neutralise this Palestinian “autonomous force” and imposed a siege on two Lebanese frontier villages, Hanine and Kfarchouba, before attacking them.Read More »

The narrator, an Arab immigrant of about 35, H., is a projectionist in an old cinema. One day, attracted by the music, he looks through the skylight and is fascinated by what he sees: the dancer in the film seems to be staring straight at him. He falls in love with her, but the vision lasts only a moment and the young woman never appears again. Shortly afterwards, an old man bursts into the cabin claiming to be his uncle. H. wants to prepare a meal for him and grabs a bottle of oil. On the label he finds the image of the dancer. A free adaptation of The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and The Condemned for Lack of Faith by Tirso de Molina.Read More »

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With its bigger-name cast and audio-visual sparkle, “Saint Laurent” also seems the safer commercial bet for international distribs, effectively the “Coco Before Chanel” to its rival’s “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.” Sony Pictures Classics has already snatched it the film off the rack for the U.S., and should be feeling a little more confident than “Yves Saint Laurent” guardians the Weinstein Co. Still, Bonello’s sexier number must gamble on sustained audience interest in a chilly figure whose life — notwithstanding the drugs, desires and debauchery that go with the high-fashion terrain — wasn’t extraordinarily dramatic.Read More »