French

Synopsis
Gérard has been a loyal supporter of communism for all his adult life, serving in the French Resistance during the Second World War and supporting the civil war in Spain. Now, in 1951, he is the deputy minister for foreign affairs in Czechoslovakia. One day, he discovers that he is being followed, and, shortly after he is arrested and taken away to a makeshift prison. Without knowing why he has been arrested or who his captors are, Gérard is ordered to confess to his crimes against the State…Read More »

How do we learn to live with others and their wishes? Director Nicolas Philibert poses this question in a village schoolhouse in Auvergne, where Georges Lopez teaches 13 children, ages ranging from about four to 12. Against a landscape of mountains and farmland, from driving snow to rain to sun, the children gather in Lopez’s warm and colorful classroom, to read, write dictation, cook, and sort things out. At home, the older ones do homework with parents after their chores. At year’s end, they look ahead to the next, visiting the middle school and meeting the little ones coming in the fall. As they learn sums and adjectives, with Lopez’s help, they also learn to live side by side -IMDbRead More »

In her first stint behind the lens, French actress Zabou Breitman takes serious material and spins a touching, funny, wonderfully played love story in “Beautiful Memories,” set in a home for amnesiacs. An ensemble cast, topped by Isabelle Carre and Bernard Campan as the two afflicted partners, keeps the fragile material fresh and engaging, though the movie’s discreet charms will make this a difficult sell offshore. However, more festival exposure is undoubtedly indicated. (Derek Elley, Variety)Read More »

These 22m41s consist of two shots with a text from Maurice Barrès about the decay of Venice followed by a movement from Cantata 205 from the Straubs’ Bach movie.Read More »

Comic-book artist Jung returns to Seoul for the first time since he was abandoned at the age of 5.Read More »

Ada was settled in her life, she was pleased with it, or thought she was. She was one half of a couple who seemed happy, she’d had a child, was even due to get married, and wham… she met Paul… And this Paul was writer to boot, who lived alone with his grown daughter, had an exceedingly intrusive mother, and had the unfortunate idea of losing his father when this story had hardly got off the ground… Life started to gather speed. It was about time.Read More »

Quote:
Bresson’s brilliant adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story (A Gentle Creature) exhibits in its lapidary sequences the political and existential revolt of a young student in Paris. Sharing a theme that can be traced from Bresson’s Mouchette to his fantastic exploration of revolutionary choices in The Devil Probably, Une Femme Douce articulates in its inimitable minimalist mode a range of issues from the ideological options of France post-May ’68 to human relationships. Dominique Sanda is not the conventional, recognizable student revolutionary, but a “gentle” philosopher whose powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny exceed and tease the prosaic, crude disposition of her bourgeois husband. The sequences in the zoo, the museum of natural history and the performance of Hamlet are powerful. On another note, look out for Indian experimental filmmaker Kumar Shahani who was assisting Bresson at this time, sitting diagonally behind Sanda in the sequence at the movie theater.
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From Toronto International Film Festival website :

Truck driving is all sixty-year-old widower Germain (Julien Poulin) has ever known. When he is involved in a head-on collision that leaves a woman dead, his quiet life is suddenly thrown into a tailspin. Though he was not at fault, the remorse he experiences is debilitating, leaving him severely depressed and unwilling to get behind the wheel again.

Deeply concerned for his father, Germain’s son Samuel (Patrice Dubois) puts his job in Montreal on hold, travels to New Brunswick to collect his estranged older brother Alain (Stéphane Breton), and together they drive to their rural Quebec hometown to care for their stricken father. The brothers, however, have their own issues: reliable Samuel is still lovelorn decades after a teenage breakup, while Alain, an inveterate raconteur and incurable womanizer, drifts aimlessly from town to town, incapable of settling down.

As the men struggle to reconnect, it becomes apparent that all three are stuck in the past for different reasons, unable to move forward. Slowly, the brothers revive Germain’s will to live, and in the process discover fresh directions for their own lives.Read More »

A brutal murder in Le Havre: 38 people must have noticed, but say they heard or saw nothing. A claustrophobic, moving, beautifully shot film with a strong cast including Yvan Attal, Sophie Quinton and Nicole Garcia. A clear picture of what fear and shame do to people.

Outside an apartment complex in the French port city of Le Havre, a female student is gruesomely murdered in the middle of the night. The complex’s 38 inhabitants say they heard or saw nothing. Until one of them, the introverted pilot Pierre (Yvan Attal), decides to break the silence. He admits to the police that he was awakened by a desperate, primeval cry. A cry that cannot have escaped his neighbours’ attention.Read More »