Synopsis
The film retraces the events of a trail in the Pyrenees, which fleeing fascism that was infecting the heart of Europe. Catalans and internationalist militants fleeing the Franco regime before; Jews, communists and dissidents by the Nazis shortly after.Read More »
Considering that it was made during a bleak and distressing period for France, Le Ciel est à vous is an astonishingly uplifting film with a message of unfettered hope for the future. It is not difficult to read director Jean Grémillon’s allegorical call to arms behind the rather anodyne tale about a Lindbergh-esque exploit, based on the real-life story of Andrée Dupeyron, the wife of a garage owner in Mont-de-Marsan. Released in February 1944, a few months before the Liberation, the film was enormously popular in France, galvanising the efforts of the Resistance and their covert supporters with its inspiring subtext. Although Jean Grémillon would go on to make three more notable films, Le Ciel est à vous was his last commercial success, the highpoint of his career before a rapid decline into obscurity.Read More »
Filmed just after the March ceasefire between France and Algeria, LE JOLI MAI documents Paris during a turning point in French history: the first time since 1939 that France was not involved in any war.
Part I, “A Prayer from the Eiffel Tower,” documents personal attitudes and feelings around Paris. A salesman feels free only when he is driving his car, and then only if there is not too much traffic. A working-class mother of eight has just gotten the larger apartment that she had been wanting for years. The space capsule of American astronaut John Glenn is examined by a group of admiring children. Two investors talk about their careers and adventures. A couple in love since their teens discuss the possibility of eternal happiness. At a middle class wedding banquet, the guests are raucous while the bride is quiet, dignified and reserved.Read More »
Synopsis:
‘Paul Dupré dies at the hands of his nurse Gina Bianchi when she administers his daily injection. His wife Catherine accuses the nurse of murdering her husband but Gina insists that she is innocent. Realising she too is a suspect, Catherine asks her lawyer, Charles Cassidi, to defend her as Judge Albert Gaudet starts his enquiry into the case. When it transpires that Paul Dupré made a will leaving his entire estate to Gina, Cassidi is confident he has a strong case. However, Judge Gaudet remains sceptical.’
– Film de FranceRead More »
SYNOPSIS:
Directed by French cult hero Jean Rollin, Perdues Dans New York/Lost In New York concerns two women who find themselves mysteriously transported from a seaside in France to the streets of New York City. Separated and lost, they must find each other and figure out how to get back home.Read More »
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 »