French

Through interviews as intimate as they are disconcerting, we meet Delphine, a Cameroonian immigrant residing in Belgium who narrates her life for the camera of Rosine Mbakam, also originally from Cameroon. As in her previous feature film “At Jolie Coiffure” (awarded at Olhar ’19), concise elements become a cinematographic force based on the encounter between black women all at once close and distant. The protagonist’s confessional tone reveals her self-awareness as the conductor of her own story, dealing with patriarchal and colonial scars and striving to assert her own voice.Read More »

François Karwitch is a young lawyer from a wealthy but stifling Jewish family. His life is meticulously ordered, he does his routine work day after day and is about to marry Fanny, the fiancée forced on him by his parents. One day, from the window of his Brussels practice, he witnesses a scene which will turn his life upside down: the brutal internment of a man in a nearby psychiatric hospital. Shocked by the treatment given to this person he decides to learn more about him. His name is Carlos; he is a revolted blue collar; and if he has been taken to this place, it is because he killed the head of an arms factory.Read More »

Philippe Noiret plays a rich, Parisian banker whose daughter, Carolina, is kidnapped by a ruthless organization. They threaten to have her abused by the sadistic clients of a brothel they run if Father doesn’t pay the ransom on time.Read More »

Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cinema in the spirit of pure play—moviemaking as an anything-goes romp through the labyrinths of imagination. The result is one of the most exuberantly inventive and utterly enchanting films of the French New Wave, in which Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama. Incorporating allusions to everything from Lewis Carroll to Louis Feuillade, Céline and Julie Go Boating is both one of the all-time-great hangout comedies and a totally unique, enveloping cinematic dream space that delights in the endless pleasures and possibilities of stories.Read More »

Ahmed meets Farah at the Sorbonne, where they both enroll in a course on Arabic literature. He’s French-born of Algerian descent; intelligent, socially awkward, an outsider in the city of his birth. She’s from Tunisia, well-to-do, cosmopolitan. She asks him to show her Paris. He quietly Googles the tourist sites. They’re equally taken by the 12th century poetry they’re reading, which is passionate, hedonistic, and erotic, but Ahmed finds it troubling to reconcile this culture with the repressive Islamic norms he has imbibed from the banlieue. As for love, he’s completely out of his depth.Read More »

Marseille, the 80s. Criminal fires, real estate business.
A burnt hill belongs to Paula Baretto, her only goods and heritage from her murdered father, ex-chemist of the French Connection…Read More »

Synopsis:
Professor Henri Faust, retiring after 50 years as an alchemist in a circa-1700 university, despairs at still knowing nothing of the true secrets of nature…whereupon his old acquaintance Mephistopheles, servant of Lucifer, appears and grants him youth and a new life. But with youth, Faust’s interest is diverted from science to women. And Mephistopheles, who has taken on the guise of the elderly Faust that was, sets many snares for his young friend’s slippery soul…Read More »

Love found and lost, and found again and the promiscuity of European youth in the 1970’s is the premise behind Blue Jeans. Director Hugues Burin des Roziers’ first feature length film tells the story of Julien Morin, an 11-year-old boy from an affluent area of Paris who takes a summer-long trip with his class to England to learn English. Along with his friends Talimard, Picolet and Dupont, the class seems more interested in meeting girls and having fun than learning English. Julien’s attentions soon turn away from his English classes and to Janet, a local girl he meets in an arcade. When she spurns him for Jean-Pierre, an older French boy, Julien too finds a physical attraction to this handsome boy. Labeled as a queer and laughed at, Julien is at first unaffected by these hurtful remarks and yearns to spend more time with his new friend. Jean-Pierre, however, is unaware of Julien’s true feelings.Read More »

The life of Jean Seberg, through unpublished testimonies: her son, Diego Gary, her sister Mary Ann, Clint Eastwood, who was her partner. The American actress, the iconic short-haired girl from A bout de souffle, reveals herself to be a passionate, militant, but also secretive and fragile woman. Her tragic ending contributes to her almost mythical aura.Read More »