La Sept-Arte

In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.

The Paris Opera Ballet's 1988 revised version of Rudolf Nureyev's 1963 production of The Nutcracker.

Documentary that tells the deepest story of Mexico today. The story of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, that army of Mayan Indians that burst into our lives with the sound of the voices of women and men who emerged, on January 1, 1994, from the Lacandon jungle to tell the powerful enough is enough!

Raoul Peck directed this French-German-Haitian drama set in Manhattan where medical examiner Chase Dellal (Geno Lechner) isn't happy with the diminishing aspects of her life: Not only does she face political pressures to soft-pedal her testimony, her marriage to a judge (Bob Meyer) is collapsing. Suddenly, new options appear after deposed Haitian politician Dimitri (Jean-Michel Martial) re-enters her life. Playwright Israel Horowitz has a role in this film as morgue cop Timothy.

A look at the 1950s muscle men's magazines and the representative industry which were popular supposedly as health and fitness magazines, but were in reality primarily being purchased by the still-underground homosexual community. Chief among the purveyors of this literature was Bob Mizer, who maintained a magazine and developed sexually inexplicit men's films for over 40 years. Aided by his mother, the two maintained a stable of not so innocent studs.

They made the first films about the king of animals, the pygmies of the Ituri forest, the first aerial photographs of Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro... "Lovers of Adventure" recounts the incredible lives of Martin and Osa Johnson, who, in the first half of the 20th century, opened millions of Americans to the unknown.

Foreign Legion officer Galoup recalls his once glorious life, training troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, until the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind.

In Hoppla!, two choreographies by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are brought together and performed to the music of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók: Mikrokosmos, seven short works for two pianos, and Quatuor no. 4, Bartók’s fourth string quartet. The reading room of the Ghent University library, designed by the renowned architect Henry Van de Velde, serves as location.

"Good son" Franck returns to his hometown to do a trainee managerial internship in the Human Resources department of the factory where his anxious, taciturn father has worked for 23 years.

In a small Central African village, boyhood friends Djimi and Koni have come of age under a post-colonial government that levies crippling taxes and legally robs local farmers of their meager crops. When impulsive Koni savagely attacks a visiting government official, the resulting massacre forces the two friends on a journey that will transform them from boys into men, from farmers into soldiers and from villagers into revolutionaries. "We fight in one world so we can live in another," declares Koni as the two battle shoulder to shoulder against government troops. But while Koni embraces the politics and carnage of their dangerous new guerilla existence, Djimi longs for the simplicity and grace of the village life they've left behind. As the rebels move closer to victory, the two friends move closer to a clash of their own.

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

Agnès Varda's documentary portrait of her late husband, Jacques Demy. A companion piece to her Jacquot de Nantes.

A female journalist becomes re-acquainted with an Algerian ex- colleague when she visits Beirut, and begins an affair with him.

Part of the Cinéastes de notre temps series.

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.

This is a combination coming out and first love story. The swimmer and diver Lucard is interested in attractive Martin. The film follows the characters' coming out with all its difficulties, the bitter-sweet pleasures of first love and the dreadful moment when one comes down to reality and realizes that one's beloved friend has a hard way to go yet. The positive message the film tries to transmit is the somewhat common motto "Live each day of your life as if it were your last."

The challenge of the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" set up by Nelson Mandela in South Africa is to achieve a truly democratic society. Composed of 17 members and Desmond Tutu, this Commission will be relayed throughout the country by groups called "Khulumani" (literally: "Free the Word"). For a little over a year, it will invite victims, perpetrators and witnesses of apartheid to tell the truth about the past. The filmmakers have been authorized to follow this incredible process, which should lead to the re-founding of the nation, for its entire duration. The film focuses on the collective character of the Commission, crossed by ethical, political and philosophical questions, as well as on a few characters, victims and executioners, linked by a common history. They are filmed in their interrogations and their steps to re-establish a link between a past and a possible future.

In this incisive dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet empire, bullet holes from WWII still pockmark the old stone buildings. Akerman journeys from East Germany to Moscow between the late summer and winter of 1993 ('while there’s still time'), chronicling in deliberate tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic tableaux yet another moment of radical upheaval in the 20th-century, the faces and bodies of Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians weighed down with obedient resignation and uncertainty.

Robespierre, a child of the Enlightenment, passionate about justice and concerned with order, is thrust into the storms of the Revolution. He becomes one of its most tragic figures. The guiding thread of this dramatic development is Robespierre’s own speech. Excerpts from his major addresses are thus staged, emphasizing the contradictions of a man who advocates for the abolition of the death penalty yet justifies the Reign of Terror, who tirelessly fights for universal suffrage but helps establish an exceptional regime. His life and exercise of power are confronted, thirty years apart, with the analyses and judgments of historians and political figures from the Bicentennial and the early 21st century: Michel Vovelle, Michel Biard, Hervé Leuwers, Patrice Gueniffey, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Michel Debré, Lionel Jospin, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, and Alexis Corbière.