French

Quote:
In 1863 Adèle Hugo, the younger daughter of the great French poet and patriot, Victor Hugo, ran away from home on the Isle of Guernsey where her father was living in exile to follow a young English officer, a Lieutenant Pinson, to his new post in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lieutenant Pinson was probably not a bad sort, not worse than most, but he wasn’t very serious.

It’s thought that the young, inexperienced Adèle had most likely been Lieutenant Pinson’s mistress for a short time on Gurnsey, and it’s known that she wanted desperately to marry him, though her father disapproved. In any case, Lieutenant Pinson was not interested — a circumstance that Adèle was ill-equipped to understand or ever to support.Read More »

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Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds—a Jewish theater manager in hiding; a leading man who’s in the Resistance; increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight—the troupe believes the show must go on. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, The Last Metro (Le dernier métro) is Truffaut’s ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity.Read More »

From frenchfilms.org

Georges Simenon’s 1940 novel Les Inconnus dans la maison is a brooding study in social breakdown and youth disaffection that contains a powerful critique of western society of the 1940s. The same can equally be said of Henri Decoin’s magnificent film adaptation, one of the earliest and most successful attempts to bring Simenon’s bleak, melancholic world to the big screen. This was the second film that Decoin made for the German-run film company Continental-Films during the Nazi Occupation of France and it could hardly be more different in tone and subject from his first, the American-style romantic comedy Premier rendez-vous (1941).Read More »

Clara spent the summer of his 16 years seeking his missing sister. Local authorities do not move. The mother is bedridden. The adults in the village seem busy with other things. Between his summer job, take care of the family home and his little sister, Clara focuses his energies to find Margarete. Aided by her friends, she searched fields, rivers, edges of highways. For Clara, the body of his elder can be under any bridge, behind any door in any warehouse. When the mystery is solved, Clara finds himself more alone and helpless. Continues his research and focus far from home.

Through an initiatory quest where dialogues are reduced to their simplest expression in favor of suggestive images and some clues gleaned here and there, the girl (Clara Turcotte) in shock oscillates between dream and reality.Read More »

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When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure. But as the increasingly erratic Betty’s grip on reality begins to falter, Zorg finds himself willing to do things he never expected to protect both her fragile sanity and their tenuous existence together. Adapted from the hit novel 37°2 le matin by Philippe Djian, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s art-house smash—presented here in its extended director’s cut—is a sexy, crazy, careening joyride of a romance that burns with the passion and beyond-reason fervor of all-consuming love.Read More »

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A night in a club. The magic of little things happening and ‘dishappening’ with some kind of ironic tendernessRead More »

Synopsis:
When the accident-prone daughter of a French businessman disappears in Mexico and the detective sent down to find her returns empty-handed, the businessman’s company psychologist comes up with an unusual plan – send someone equally accident-prone to find her. Despite detective Campana’s objections and disbelief in bad luck, he and Francois Perrin, the accident-prone man in question, are teamed up and head back down to Mexico to pick up the girl’s trail.Read More »

Synopsis:
No one would think that Manuel Ismora, an esteemed society photographer, is an audacious thief and con artist. The newspapers are ?lled with accounts of Ismora’s criminal exploits, which involve the fraudulent sale of a château and the theft of some valuable jewels, but the police are slow in bringing him to justice. Instead, it is Gabriel Dupon, a modest button salesman who bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Imora, who ends up being taken into custody. Positively identi?ed by Imora’s many victims, Dupon is branded a criminal, and even when he is released by the police through lack of evidence, his reputation is in tatters.Read More »

this is a docu about Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a french comic actor & politician, and the “witch hunt” that has been surrounding him ever since he portrayed an israeli settler as a terrorist on live french TV a few years ago.

in addition to a Dieudonné biography & a study of the line between being anti-sionist & being anti-semitic, this docu mostly raises the question of freedom of speech in the contemporary french democracy.Read More »