France

A recently released convict goes to a small village to lay low for a while. His contact is the local priest. Unfortunately, the priest suddenly dies and the villagers all think that the con is their new village priest.Read More »

In the solitude of his apartment, Rousseau reads shorts excerpts from Racine’s Bérénice, images of separation; he films in a café, musicians in the street, a dance, domestic intimacy, in a self-portrait that reflects the contradiction between desires and time. “For a long time I have wanted to try and see if I could create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured. There are those who believe that this very simplicity is a sign of a lack of inventiveness. They do not consider that, on the contrary, all invention is to create something out of nothing.” (Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670.)Read More »

A murky, downbeat spy thriller written by José Giovanni and starring Lino Ventura. A French spy in Vienna is suspected of being a double agent, and a colleague of his is sent over to investigate. When the former man is kidnapped by the Russians, his complex network of contacts has to be unravelled in order to trace an important microfilm. The two final ironic twists sort of cancel each other out, but a British director and Michael Caine could have done wonders with this script. Deray’s dry, anonymous matter-of-factness would be more suited to the parable of Un papillon sur l’épaule that he made with Ventura about a decade later.Read More »

Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, his mother vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave, but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point. The Damned Don’t Cry combines melodrama and neorealism to tell the story of a mother-son relationship on the fringes, observing the effects of oppression – both economic and affective – in a cut-throat world. Borrowing its title from a 1950s Joan Crawford melodrama, The Damned Don’t Cry employs non-professional actors for its two main actors and almost the entire cast. In his second feature which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa manages to avoid pastiche while ‘readily embracing some of the formal elements of melodrama’ as he takes his inspiration from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Le notti di Cabiria.Read More »

Antoine loves Clarisse and would like to marry her. Or how a simple story of a lost ring leads a young woman to say yes, finally!Read More »

Philippe advocates total sexual freedom and strongly encourages his partner Esther to do the same. But when the young woman decides to take him at his word, Philippe finds it intolerable. And that’s when all their problems begin…Read More »

Short documentary with varied footage from Iran. The Shah’s regime commissioned several soft-propaganda films of this nature from European filmmakers during the 1970s. Its existence and production is more remarkable than the film itself.Read More »

Young woman who lives under the gaze of her overprotective stepmother falls for a young man she meets. He is infatuated by her beauty, but is also a sociopath. She wants to leave her stepmother’s hold and he is ready to kill.Read More »

Quote:
MOR-VRAN starts with a shot of the sea, followed by one of the map of the Breton coastline. Next, we see images of the various islands off the coast: harbours, a mill, sheep, a lighthouse, cemeteries. The women are dressed in black. In the port of Brest there is a great hustle and bustle. A sailor pays a visit to the fair and wins a chain. He returns to the island of Sein by boat. As the result of a storm he will never get there. After a few weeks, his body, with the chain, washes ashore. On Sein, people start repairing the damage caused by the storm. A young couple talks about the future, about buying a house and a boat. A widow visits a graveyard. With MOR-VRAN, Jean Epstein continued his series of films about the Breton coast. This documentary was obviously conceived as a silent movie: inserted titles explain the action, while music accentuates the atmosphere. Epstein creates a gloomy atmosphere by using pregnant images: the sea leaves serious scars on the islands off the Breton coast. Nevertheless, life goes on.Read More »