French

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Mircea Eliade was a traditionalist Romanian novelist and philosopher. Following the disaster of the Second World War, he moved to Paris and Chicago, becoming a respected and influential historian of religions. He acquired something of the status of a guru, as poignantly told in the 1987 documentary Mircea Eliade et la redécouverte du sacré. The film features interviews with Eliade at the end of his life, artfully spliced with cuts to religious imagery on a background of moving spiritual music. It was released in 1987, the year after his death.Read More »

Synopsis
They do say that Paris is the city of love and that’s certainly true for American TV reporter Bryan Deal: he’s barely out of the airport when he’s picked up by a pair of beautiful bisexual air-hostesses and whisked back for a spot of le nookie. But can his conservative Anglo-Saxon upbringing allow him to embrace these new freedoms?

More ambitious than most seventies soft-core, The French Love captures the mood of fashionable French youth of the time, with sexual liberation linked to political transformation.Read More »

The impossible love between a minor young man and a nun. In 1944, in Marseille, Denis, a 14-year-old boy, finishes his 3rd year at a Jesuit college. During a visit to a patient in a hospital, he notices Sister Clotilde, a young nun who is not insensitive to her charm. Their friendship grows until the mother superior understands that it is evolving towards a feeling of love. Despite the advice of their respective entourage and imposed separation, they give in to their passion and eventually run away to spend the summer in Haute-Loire, in a property of the family of Sister Clotilde. When the Liberation arrives, the taboos and society catch up with them.Read More »

An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.Read More »

On the verge of revolution, the bankrupt kingdom of Casinaria begs the richest man in the world to pay a visit and offer financial advice. Upon his arrival our hero is accidentally hit on the head and he later awakens as a babbling imbecile.Read More »

Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:

In early twentieth-century Brittany, two peasants marry, have a son, and live in traditional Breton ways: three generations under one roof, a division of labor between the sexes, elders’ stories at night, politics and religion during their little free time. Times are hard: la Chienne du Monde drives some to suicide; Ankou (death) is close at hand. Pierre is born into this republican family, his lyric childhood interrupted by the outbreak of war and his father’s conscription. He learns his catechism and, as a child of a Reds, also reveres school. His grandfather and father often put him on their shoulders, giving him a ride on the horse of pride.Read More »

In Chris Marker’s Studio by Agnès Varda is a rare and beautiful moment in cinema where two friends — who happen to be pioneering, legendary filmmakers from the French New Wave — meet in real life and in a virtual world. In the film, which was shot at two points between 2009-2011, Agnès Varda visits Chris Marker in his studio, a few years before his passing. She admires his magnificent mess, snooping around for details that reveal “the hidden side of Marker’s work”: a labyrinth of wires and computer equipment, a collection of images, magazines, and books, and — of course — cats. The film takes on a wonderful surrealist turn when Varda creates an avatar to meet Marker’s avatar in the online virtual world of Second Life.Read More »

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »