French

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This poetic feature film is based on a Doris Lessing story, “Diary of the Good Neighbor”. With great clarity, the filmmaker presents a difficult, but not unusual situation: the sad and lonely life of a frail old woman with very limited means, living in a shabby apartment. Yet when a successful and attractive forty–something businesswoman encounters the old woman, at first appalled by her situation, and then enters her world, the result is a poignant relationship between two very different people. An important film that deals with the very timely issues of caregiving, responsibility, and aloneness.Read More »

Ruthless and for some viewers, also vulgar and unpleasant, this comedy by Marcel Carne has a madhouse of characters of dubious morals going through equally questionable antics. Their objectives are primarily self-serving. A former gangster (Paul Meurisse) is interested only in keeping birds, and his take from his last heist to help him go straight. In the same house is Lucie (Dany Saval) who is supporting her Italian lover by sleeping with the butcher. Meanwhile, the butcher’s wife has her own lover, his assistant. Read More »

Southern Morocco, 1963. The owner of a truck transports company hires a new driver (a self-called American tough guy) to transport mysterious goods in a brand new magnificent truck. While the established group of drivers of the company is welcoming the new driver, one of them (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo)hijack the mysterious truck on the day after, planning to negotiate the sale of goods for its own profit and fly over with his new young bride. The best driver of the company (played by Lino Ventura)is launched to his young fellow’s pursuit. Read More »

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Series of programs broadcast on RAI TV in Italy showing footage shot by Roberto Rossellini in India. The series was also broadcast on ORTF TV in France under the title ‘J’AI FAIT UN BEAU VOYAGE PAR ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’. The footage shown in the individual episodes seems to have been the same in the Italian and French series.

Rossellini stayed in India for almost 9 months, refusing to look at famous monuments and rather preferring to take a non-exotic view of India, by looking at lives of common persons.Read More »

A desert island in the Atlantic, a woman alone after the death of both her brother and her husband, a very young French sailor abandoned by his ship. Love takes over and an enchanted new life begins, although they do not speak the same language. But it all comes to an abrupt end… Amália Rodrigues with her radiant beauty in an almost silent picture.

Free adaptation of a short story by Herman Melville, shot in a deserted islands near Madeira.Read More »

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There are always people who say: you can’t change people by force. Them, they say: it’s not so clear, we know our business and have a lot of time.

The former central preventive prison for political prisoners of the former GDR Ministry of State Security (Stasi) in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen was not an ordinary place of detention. This building, which did not appear on the maps of East Berlin and which still bears traces of Germany’s recent history (Nazism, Soviet occupation, communist dictatorship), has the grim particularity of having as many interrogation rooms as detention cells. Read More »

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“Positif” a publié le premier entretien avec Tarkovski en France. Cette anthologie de textes parus dan la revue rassemble études, critiques, entretiens avec le cinéaste et témoignages de ses collaborateurs. Elle est illustrée de 70 photographies.Read More »

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After Calderón and Proust, Comédie de l’innocence is another literary adaptation, this time from the little-known Italian surrealist Massimo Bontempelli. Updated from the last fin de siècle to this more recent time of uncertainty, Comédie de l’innocence’s plot is small but perfectly formed. With Aristotelian rigour it moves from the opening conundrum (a child torn between two mothers), through the complication (the confrontation between the mothers and Ariane’s brother Serge), to a satisfying conclusion. Ruiz, who takes a co-credit as scriptwriter with Françoise Dumas, keeps up the tension, however, with laconic and enigmatic dialogue. When Ariane visits the empty flat of Isabella, a nosy neighbour remarks: ‘I really don’t want to know.’ Ariane replies: ‘There is nothing to know.’Read More »

“La Cérémonie” de 2014, est donné en complément de “Change pas de main” dans l’édition La Traverse. C’est un film tourné en parallèle au dernier long “Nuits blanches sur la Jetée” ; une sorte de rêverie incestueuse construite sur la permutation ludique des deux interprètes, Astrid Adverbe et Pascal Cervo, à nouveau fils et fille de fiction tendrement fantasmés du réalisateur.
“The Ceremony” (2014), is featured as an extra to “Change pas de main” in the La Traverse release. It is a film shot in parallel with the feature film “Nuits blanches sur la jetée”; a sort of incestuous reverie built on the playful permutation of the two performers, Astrid Adverbe and Pascal Cervo, this time again as fictive son and daughter , tenderly fantasized by the director.Read More »