French

The misadventures of young Elizabeth journeying through the French countryside by train. Her companion falls prey to a bloodthirsty zombie, while she barely escapes with her life and dodges an undead shambler with a penchant for bashing his head against car windshields. She finds shelter in a nearby farmhouse inhabited by a man and wife, but alas her safety is short-lived when the farmer takes a pitchfork to his spouse on the kitchen table. Apparently their consumption of wine for the local vineyards is to blame, and soon the countryside is filled with the anguished, half-conscious victims of the grapes contaminated by chemical exposure. With the aid of two die hard beer drinkers, Elizabeth fights back against the growing zombie population during a long night of unrelenting terror.Read More »

IDFA Synopsis :
A number of farmers – Jean Rouch’s actors who more or less play themselves – is looking for a simple and cheap way to irrigate their farmland. They dream of a green Niger. While struggling against their Sahel country turning into a desert more and more, they develop the idea to get a windmill from Holland. Rouch follows the three men – Damour, Lam, and Tallou – when they examine how wind-energy is applied in Holland. Jean Rouch: “The solution we are looking for is simple, so it will work. That is the moral of the film. So many projects have been carried out in this country that have failed. They are the ‘poisoned presents’: waterpumps installed but never maintained. The landscape is filled with these modern ruins.” MADAME L’EAU unmistakably has ironic overtones, but Rouch’s effort is genuine. He protests against the tendency of Third World development projects looking for expensive and complicated solutions that do not fit in with the needs of the local population.Read More »

Synopsis
A dramatic triptych offering differing perspectives about death and its aftermath, set on a Brittany beach during the late summer…

L’histoire d’un chateau de sable, de celui qui le construit et de ceux qui l’observent sur une plage de Bretagne. Tous ont eu à vivre la perte d’un proche…Read More »

“In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona.Read More »

Rossellini 77
Last images from Roberto Rossellini filming the Centre Georges Pompidou,
February-March-April-May 1977.

Following the steps of Roberto Rossellini on day to day basis, making the film “LE CENTRE GEORGE POMPIDOU” we could not know the issue of his last encounter with the cinéma.

10 Hours of 16 mm coulour film, 30 hours of sound recordings… More than 2500 slides were produced as he wished :
“to represent things as they are and stay on the field of the honesty”.
Unique experience… 30 years after…
From this story, as promised… a film is being born.Read More »

Quote:
After 553 days of self-imposed solitude in the wilderness, Emile the poet and St-Pierre the lumberjack head for the nearest town to fulfill the demands of nature, they must find a woman. A nearly fatal experiment in kidnapping brings “the males” running back to their camp, where they find that a woman has come to them voluntarily. With civilization now safely out of reach, they try to set up a perfect, harmonious threesome.Read More »

Quote:
Cahiers du Cinéma chose Oublie-moi as its no. 5 pick of 1995 on its annual Top 10 list. Oublie-moi is directed by award-winning director Noémie Lvovsky (whose Les Sentiments was recently recognized as one of the greatest films of 2003 by long-standing Cahiers rival, Positif). Along with being one of the most accomplished and critically well-regarded new directors from France Lvovsky has also had her scripts filmed by the likes of Arnaud Desplechin and Philippe Garrell. Oublie-moi is also one of her original scripts.Read More »

Quote:
Pierre Etaix’s first feature introduces the droll humor and oddball charm of its unique writer-director-star. As a tribute to Buster Keaton, Etaix fashioned this lovable story of a privileged yet sheltered young man (played by Etaix himself, in a nearly silent performance) who, under pressure from his parents, sets out to find a young woman to marry—though he has a hard time tearing his mind away from the famous singer whose face decorates the walls of his bedroom.Read More »

Quote:
A man has everything: dozens of servants, a palace, vast woods, gardens, a lake, mechanical toys, private entertainment troupes of musicians and dancers. He has it all – but love. When alone, he sits at a desk, sighing, and looking at a photograph of a pretty girl. One day, the circus descended onto his palace, and amidst all the fun it brought, he recognized the Amazon on the white horse – the girl in the photograph. The girl is now the mother of a small boy, Yo-Yo, whom she considers that looks like the millionaire, even under a clown’s make-up. Read More »