French

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Caught stealing drugs from the wrong people, 27 year old Vincent is in trouble and on the run from the local mob. Fleeing to the backwoods, Vincent unexpectedly reconnects with his brother Michel with whom he’d cut ties many years ago. As he tries to maintain the semblance of a normal life hanging out with friends and playing in his band, Vincent witnesses his brother’s own turbulent downward spiral. MAUDITE POUTINE draws us into a darkly dystopian rural world, a place in which violence pervades the everyday but humanity still manages to shine through the cracks.Read More »

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Franck Poupart is a slightly neurotic door-to-door salesman in a sinister part of Paris’ suburbs. He meets Mona, a teenager, who’s been made a prostitute by her own aunt. Franck would like to change his life and also save Mona from her aunt. Murder is the only solution.Read More »

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On April 27, 1937, in the midst of a grueling and increasingly brutal Spanish Civil War, the
ancient Basque town of Guernica was subjected to an extended duration bombardment
campaign by German forces in an unrelenting aerial campaign designed to demoralize the
collective psyche of the Basque nation and to also show camaraderie (and military
alliance) with the nationalists under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.Read More »

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Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (or Howling Wind, per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily Brontë’s famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism. This is one of Rivette’s most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film’s tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating’s haunted house melodrama played straight.Read More »

A distinguished drama and considered an important entry in French cinema’s new naturalism from one of the ’80s most promising French filmmakers, this drama presents a shocking but humanistic look at the tragic lives of impoverished children living in the Paris projects. Bruno is a teenaged boy who has just moved into a high-rise project with his hard-working mother.Read More »

Synopsis
Comedy: After French yuppie Arthur Vlaminck has graduated at the National School of Administration he joins the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. Vlaminck’s ambitious new colleagues try to bully him around while his superior Claude Maupas acts on the other hand rather phlegmatic. Somewhat surprisingly Vlaminck’s career gains momentum.Read More »

Jean Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators travel to France to perform a reverse ethnography of late-1960’s Parisian life.

Icarus Films wrote:
By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronicle of a Summer, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Little by Little, Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators Damoure Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.Read More »

How does a fiction writer turn to documentary essays to confront horror in times of emergency and shock? The Tokyo subway attack, orchestrated by members of the Aum cult in March 1995, profoundly impacted Haruki Murakami’s life and transformed him as a writer. In the months that followed, he collected testimonies from victims and some members of the Aum sect. His essay Underground was an attempt to explore the deeper causes of the tragedy, beyond the superficial media coverage. This work ultimately inspired one of his most internationally renowned novels: 1Q84Read More »

Synopsis:
May, 1946, in Paris young poet Jacques Prevel meets Antonin Artaud, the actor, artist, and writer just released from a mental asylum. Over ten months, we follow the mad Artaud from his cruel coaching of an actress in his “theatre of cruelty” to his semi-friendship with Prevel who buys him drugs and hangs on his every word. Meanwhile, Prevel divides his time between Jany, his blond, young, drug-hazed mistress, and Rolande, his dark-haired, long-suffering wife, who has a child during this time. Cruelty, neglect, poverty, egoism, madness, and the pursuit of art mix on the Left Bank.Read More »