France

It’s summertime, 2021. Isabelle Huppert plays Lioubov, Chekhov’s unforgettably heroine in The Cherry Orchard. In a near theatre, Fabrice Luchini recites Nietzsche. Both actors are premiering at Avignon’s Festival. When they leave backstage to stand out on stage, they are completely transformed. As everything seems utterly natural, audience does not imagine what happened before. By following their daily lives during the weeks preceding the premieres, Benoît Jacquot brings a singular perspective of the two actors and shows them like we’ve never seen before.Read More »

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From Venice to Illiers, a journey into the memory of Proust.

Made for French television on the occasion of Marcel Proust’s centenary.

Guy Gilles’ film freely intersperses documentary language with fiction, embodied in the figure of a visitor in search of the places and faces that Proust loved, from the Illiers-Combray of his childhood to the longed-for Venice that he never got to know.

With the participation of Patrick Jouané, Céleste Albaret, Pierre Larcher
and the voice of Emmanuelle Riva

Collaboration: Jean-Pierre Desfosse, Philippe Rousselot, Gérard Alary, Denise Baby, Prosper Seban.

ORTF production
, Roger Stéphane (broadcast June 17, 1971)Read More »

As political and social tumult rocked France in May and June of 1968, Jean Eustache used his first documentary to focus on persistent tradition, in the form of a centuries-old ceremony in his hometown of Pessac. Each year, Pessac’s civic leaders choose a young woman they consider an exemplar of moral virtue, with a daylong celebration commemorating the changing of the guard from the previous year’s “virgin” to the present one. Eustache observes the exacting selection process, the fostering of communal bonds, and a bold implication by Pessac’s presiding priest that the ritual upholds the same Christian values for which leftist students and workers were then currently fighting.Read More »

On a farm in the West of France, Catherine a plump little girl, dreams of escaping her joyless life. Her parents do not seem to know what a heart is and her father can get violent occasionally. Her only hope lies in those big trucks that drive zooming along the main road under her bedroom window.Read More »

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With the aforementioned anti-biography, 39-year-old Damien Odoul, author of the film L’Histoire de Richard O., brings in something of his own nature into the main character Richard O (Mathieu Amalric), who, together with his best friend (Stéphane Terpereau) lives an anarchical life, filled up with crazy sex which proves fatal. His love partners are women selected by video tapes who are needed for future erotic films and that is the starting inspiration for Richard O. to involve us in his sex-video anarchy. This courageous film shows us a totally different Amalric who is simply perfect as Richard O. In one typical sequence, being on the bank of the river Sena with a girl, after having mad-sex, Richard O. with all the anarchy in himself yells at the passing boat with tourists: “Hey tourists! Paris doesn’t give a shit for you!”Read More »

Psychological narrative avantgarde film about a wealthy young businessman who consecutively falls in love with a classy English woman (Pearl), a Russian sculptress (Athalia), and a naive working-class girl (Lucie). Overpowered by weakness, the coward sidesteps the obligations that love affairs impose: rather than living up to his dates he takes his sports-car from an ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of Deauville. On his way, he is fatally hit by a descending swallow. The film is divided into three segments each of which consists of events the woman experienced. These sequences are embedded in scenes in which each of the three women is telling and casting her mind back to her own love affair. Thus, present, future and past merge and cannot be distinguished clearly. The intertwinement of several layers of time experience, recollection, telling and showing have been regarded as a source of inspiration of Alain Resnais and this film prefigures his “L’Année dernière à Mariënbad” to a certain extent.Read More »

Synopsis
Without knowing it, newspaper photographer Daniele (Annie Girardot) is caught up in a complex international situation involving super-secret conflicts between NATO, the CIA and the Pentagon. An American politician, whom she has been photographing, is the target of an assassination conspiracy. Her husband, also a news photographer, gets wind of it, and is killed. As she investigates, she also begins to know more than is safe for her. Unfortunately for her, her charming neighbor Julien (Jacques Dutronc), an old friend, is also involved.

Danièle Gaur, photographe, enquête sur le suicide présumé de son mari Michel, retrouvé noyé. Ses investigations la conduisent à découvrir un complot visant à assassiner John W. Maxwell et à faire la connaissance de Julien Mercier, voisin de Michel.Read More »

In a village in Brittany, a young maid and an old woman are spinning while the wind blows threateningly outdoors. In spite of the bad omen, the young maid’s boyfriend decides to sail away. Worried, the young maid ask for help to a mysterious old man and his magical crystal ball in order to calm down the rough seas.Read More »

The story of two ex-legionnaires in a mission of political assasination in Romania. A candid portrayal of the human side of assassins.Read More »