French

Marc is in love with Lucien, who’s in love with Suzanne, who’s in love with someone else.

L’amour à l’état brut, avec ses perles et ses cailloux, ses imperfections et ses éclats de vie. Sandrine Bonnaire superbe d’émotion et de vérité.Read More »

Ainsi Va La Vie (2019)
A portrait of three women striving to forge their own rosy paths.

The film was produced in 2019 by Nobuhiro Suwa as an commercial for a cosmetics brand called ALBION. It was once on YouTube, but now the link is downRead More »

Tendres cousines (1980)
With the outbreak of WWII, the sudden call to arms will send the men of a family’s estate to the front, leaving a curious adolescent alone with the remaining women of the house, in need of a warm embrace and, possibly, a daring kiss.Read More »

“For Jean-Luc Godard,with all the admiration and affection of
Jacques Perconte and Nicole Brenez,December 3, 2020.”

At the end of October (a few days before my birthday actually) Nicole Brenez asked me to produce a small film for a great man, a short film, a film like a birthday song, a common gift. Of course, I go for it, although I wonder how I could do something like this. That JLG sees one of my films, that he tampers with it and uses it is a blessing, a huge honor, but it’s quite another thing to send him images, to make a little film for him, so humble the gesture be it … Nicole Brenez sends me many portraits that she likes very much, some are historical documents, others images made by JLG himself. She also sends me documents, films, recordings. An incredible amount of stuff for a month of immersion. The birthday is December 3. I don’t know why, but I immediately wanted to grab my camera and take JLG to a screen on a boat, for a ride in the port of Rotterdam (where I live). I have tried several times to express this intuition. I wanted to film.Read More »

In a large building in a Parisian district, Elsa lives alone. Her young neighbor Alice hears her playing the piano at home and enjoys it. Elsa suggests that she learn the piano and offers to play it at home, when she is not there. Alice thus gets into the habit of living in Elsa’s apartment several times a week.Read More »

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June 1944, France is still under the German occupation. The writer and communist Robert Antelme, major figure of the Resistance, is arrested and deported. His young wife Marguerite Duras, writer and resistant, is torn by the anguish of not having news of her and her secret affair with her comrade Dyonis. She meets a French agent working at the Gestapo, Pierre Rabier, and, ready to do anything to find her husband, puts himself to the test of an ambiguous relationship with this troubled man, only to be able to help him. The end of the war and the return of the camps announce to Marguerite Duras the beginning of an unbearable wait, a slow and silent agony in the midst of the chaos of the Liberation of Paris.Read More »

Based on Guitry’s own stage play about a sanctimonious fellow who eventually’s victimized by his own hypocrisy. Little effort’s made to “cinematize” the property, which’s filmed just as it was staged.Read More »

After being left for another man by his wife, Charles Bellanger raises his only son to fear and suspect women. Years later, such an education is bearing fruit.Read More »

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Périot’s inspired third feature invites French high school students to reenact key scenes from RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY, WITH THE BLOOD OF OTHERS, Godard’s LA CHINOISE and other 1960s and 70s films which deal with radical politics. These reenactments are intercut with discussions that explore what, if anything, the subjects of these scenes mean to the students now. Both a lesson in film history and a snapshot of the political present, this smart and subtle film proposes an original perspective on the contemporary state of French cinema’s radical past.Read More »