Les voitures d’eau (The River Schooners)
Through their anecdotes and their actions, the artisans of Île-aux-Coudres tell us about the science of wooden boats at a time when iron ships are invading the St. Lawrence river. After a disastrous boating season, the filmmaker questions the economic and political future of an entire culture. This last film of the trilogy witnesses the end of the era of wooden schooners and of the men who knew how to build and pilot them.Read More »
A portmanteau film in which the producer, instead of as usual using already well known directors with a commercial draw, allowed five new young directors to each have a crack at an episode about romance.Read More »
A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster, who’s cinematic 2007 solo show at Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris will be supplemented in 2008 by the Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern (joining Carsten Holler’s slides, Olafur Eliason’s sun, and Doris Salcedo’s crack amongst many other prestigious past projects).Read More »
IMDB:
The history of the Entente Cordiale in the big and small picture, from 1898, when a French officer occupied the village of Fashoda, Sudan to 8 April 1904, when a series or agreements marking the rapprochement between England and France were signed. To this turnaround in public opinion corresponds a parallel evolution in the intimate feelings of two families, one English and the other French which will result in the French heir marrying the English daughter.
—Guy BellingerRead More »
Nicole Garcia’s film shows a family through an adult man’s figure, and his weekdays. The main character is one of the sons of an old and ill man who is in hospital nowadays. The father has 2 other sons too. Jean Paul visits his father all day. After he divorced his life is unexciting and troubled. He has a lot of dark suits, a good car, a big house but he has some debts, and his private life touch bottom. He has to call his brothers and ask them to help …Read More »
Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. (-criterion.com)Read More »
Inspired by Jacques Mesrine’s autobiographical book “L’Instinct de mort” – which he wrote in prison shortly before his magnificent final escape – Jean-François Richet’s fast-paced drama charts Mesrine’s rise from a wayward French soldier in Algeria to a bolder and bolder criminal on the streets of Paris. Mesrine’s outlaw odyssey even brought him to Canada, where he fell in with separatist radicals in Quebec. Thirty years after French police gunned him down in a spectacular shootout, his infamy lives on. Equal parts thriller and biopic, Mesrine remains faithful to its central character, a dynamic figure who is by no means a model protagonist.Read More »
The story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s public enemy No. 1 during the 1970s. An evocation of the his life, which traces the colorful career of this gangster called “the man with the hundred faces”. After nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats – from multiple bank robberies and to prison breaks – Mesrine was gunned down by the French police in Paris. The second episode of the Mesrine legend.Read More »
