Rebecca Brite’s review from IMDB :
How has this gem slipped under IMDb users’ radar all these years, especially after winning a César for best documentary short subject? It is slow, succinct and absolutely riveting. With his photojournalist’s eye, and simple but inspired camera work, Depardon plunges us into both the sounds and silences of a day and a night in the city. Further description would be superfluous; what the film doesn’t do is as important as what it does. Kudos to distributor Marin Karmitz for resurrecting it.Read More »
Synopsis
Sandrine Bonnaire plays a European researcher who is abducted by some ill-educated rebels in a North African country. They have no clear reason for holding her hostage, and after a considerable period of time (and an escape attempt by their captive), they simply let her go. The story is based on a similar situation that the director Raymond Depardon covered when he was a reporter.Read More »
Quote:
In 1986, the Cinémathèque française celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Throughout the year, filmmakers and personalities from the world of cinema (from Bette Davis to Wim Wenders, from Elia Kazan to Nagisa Ōshima, from Claude Chabrol to Werner Schroeter…) took turns in the legendary hall of the Palais de Chaillot to show and talk about their films.
In 2023, twelve of these filmed interviews were rediscovered in the form of rushes on Betacam cassettes. Historic and never-before-seen, they will be presented on HENRI over the course of the 2023-2024 season.Read More »
Director (Luc Delahaye) with his casting assistant (Sylvie Peyre) are in search of a new face – an actress for the head role in his next movie. A series of interviews with young actresses and ordinary french woman, seen on Gare Saint-Lazire, follows.Read More »
A man invites a woman to share his room in a hostel in Djibouti because she seems to have some problems. Gradually he falls in love with her. They embark on a trip to the towns in the desert and, on the way, they learn more about each other. The man never appears on screen, so the camera becomes his point of view.Read More »
Paris, summer 1982. The day to day life of a police station in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Day and night a reporter follows small groups of uniformed police officers who patrol the neighbourhood in their vans, intervene at the slightest radio call, prepare reports or question defendants at the central station.
Shot alone by Depardon, Faits divers (News Items) is a live report, without a commentary, on the day to day activities of police officers in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. By observing the police officers, Depardon’s camera reveals the hidden side of Paris. The Paris of everyday assaults, poverty and distress. In a way, he opened a cycle of films on those who had been forgotten by everyone and began to give them a voice as he explained: “The shooting was laborious, but in this film, I was able to record the words of individuals who never have access to the media […] Is Paris a difficult city to live in? Or a city where you get help? There is probably a French-style violence, and the police officers are poorly prepared social workers.”Read More »
Quote: Traveling alone, internationally acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing France with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile ground for the creation of an extraordinary travel journal. Depardon revisited important places from his past as a reporter: Chad, Venice and Cannes. Previously unseen footage from his archive has also been added to create an intimate, compelling and revelatory ‘Journal de France’ – a unique portrait of a country and its landscapes.Read More »
This is the story, adapted from the novel by Diego Brosset, and told in voice-over by an unseen, French-speaking narrator, of a fearless North African tribesman, Alifa, around the early part of the last century, and how he avoided contact with the white man. Rescued from death as a boy, he moves between different tribes before becoming a desert guide for a group of rebels.Read More »
Quote: This French anthology is a tribute to A Propos de Nice (1930), a classic documentary that took a poetic and sometimes satirical look at life in the French Riviera town. This version blends fact and fiction to chronicle life in modern-day Nice and is comprised of seven vignettes, each directed by an internationally renowned filmmaker. Only one of the episodes, “Reperages,” from Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Parviz Kimiavi, stays close to the style of the original film by Jean Vigo as it chronicles the experiences of a filmmaker who came to Nice to do research on Vigo for his upcoming documentary. Read More »
