La Sept-Arte

In a nursing home for disabled near Toulon, René is unanimously hated by all. With fifty years and suffering from myopathy, has an irascible, rebellious character. But not resist provocations candor and uprightness of Julie, a special educator rookie. He confesses he wants to make love to a woman before her degenerative disease definitely catch it. Then Julie goes after one of the prostitutes who work in caravans along the N7.

In this French drama, a teenager falls into a life of crime, little realizing the consequences. S. is a moody young man who loses his job at a bakery, and decides to throw in his lot with a group of thieves about the same age as himself. S. and his cronies are strictly small-timers, pulling off second-rate break-ins for an older crime boss, but his willingness to do what he's told helps him rise up the ladder to bigger and more lucrative jobs. However, S. lacks the maturity or experience to deal with the risks, and after a few disastrous mistakes, he finds his fortunes sinking far faster than they rose.

Ten years after their Upper Sixth, Bruno, Momo, Leon and Alain meet together in the waiting room of a maternity hospital. The father of the awaited baby is Tomasi, their best friend at that time, who died one month before due to an overdose. They remember their teenage, their laughs, their dreams, their stupid pranks... a description of the French youth in the middle of the seventies.

A low-income housing estate in the south of France, at the time of the soccer World Cup. The daughter of the leader of an extreme right-wing party sets out to discover the world of the fans.

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.

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.

Rap ? Violent words, a social chronicle without complacency at a time of the politically correct and a wishywashy consensus. Twenty years after its first babblings in the popular quarters of New York, rap has imposed its presence beyond the borders. Je rap donc je suis (I Rap Therefore I Am) goes around five different towns where it meets rappers driven by the same motivation. In Paris and its suburbs, Marseille and its districts, Algiers, London or Berlin, rappers move, play, record, teach... And above all, they talk. Outside of any promotional context, the present-day heralds of French hip-hop, from La Rumeur to IAM, speak about the role of rap, the environment in which it was born, boredom, the feeling of belonging to a sacrificed generation, drugs in districts of towns, immigration, parents, political and social actors, the police, school, writing, money, the parallel economy, violence...

A 35-year-old woman develops a strange passion for a 16-year-old homeless boy. A strong relationship develops between them, like mother and child, woman and man, single person and lonely soul.

In 1962, in the South-West of France, three boarding school boarders experience their first stirrings of love and clash on ideological grounds. Their meeting with Maîté, the daughter of a communist teacher, will prove decisive.

Just before the turn of the 21st century, Dramane, a Malian who lives in Paris, returns to his family's African village to visit his father. After biking around the town, Dramane realizes how different and stagnated his village is compared to the ever-changing modern world, especially at the dawn of a new millennium. While home, Dramane strikes up a friendship with beautiful villager Nana, with whom he contemplates the future. The film earned Sissako awards at the Fribourg International Film Festival, the Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. (...) In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”

Chris Marker’s portrait of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky documents the director at work on his final film, The Sacrifice, during the last year of his life. Interweaving behind-the-scenes footage with excerpts from Tarkovsky’s earlier works, Marker crafts a moving reflection on the artist’s vision, methods, and enduring legacy.

A Palestinian boy becomes entranced with a beautiful Romani girl and a fairy tale world she weaves amidst conflict in Gaza. The children explore nature, mysticism and what their future holds, while learning to live with the surrounding brutality c. 1990. Yusef's family scrapes by in a seaside camp while his father's in prison and his heavily-armed brother's on the run, parrying with Israeli troops. Salah, Yusef's schoolmate from a well-off Arab family strives faithfully to assist them, while Yusef helps an elderly, blind neighbor escape from his lonely abandonment into the North American dreamworld he's waited so long for.

Istambul, 1967. Two women meet at Avrenos, a tavern in the old city. Nouchi, the brunette, is mourning the death of Bernard de Jonsac, an employee of the French Embassy who recently died. It is Lélia, the blonde, who asked her to come. She wants to understand the ties that bound them both to Jonsac, to understand the strange couple that this desperate dandy formed with Nouchi, the ex-Bulgarian bar girl. Lélia, the middle-class woman from Istanbul, wants to understand at last, ten years after the tragedy that has left her confined to a wheelchair for life...

An outer suburb of Paris, 1972. Gilles and Christine, both sixteen, are classmates and lovers who have become frustrated with the aloofness of their families and the general monotony of their lives. When the pair are caught shoplifting, Christine's father ships her off to a home for emotionally disturbed children, temporarily putting space between her and Gilles. Luckily for them, though, she escapes and the couple contemplate running away together.

This French-produced 1996 documentary is an hour-long piece covering the history of techno music from Detroit to Berlin Sheffield.

September, 1986. Alice and Martin are 17 years old. They come from provinces to Montesquieu high school in the capital. Like many youngs of their age, born in the 70s and nostalgic of a too comfortable childhood, they progress carefully in life. While Alice and Martin are finding their footing, demonstrations against the Devaquet law and the tragic death of Malik Oussekine are happening.

1995. On the outskirts of Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, a policeman is murdered. Shot outside his vehicle, while his fiancée sits in the car, terrified. Superintendent Kouassi is the detective in charge of the investigation. Tall and lanky, he moves with the tired energy of a man who has seen it all. Drawing on a network of underworld characters with dubious information, Kouassi’s team begins bringing in potential suspects and subjecting them to horrific brutality: beating them with sticks, hanging them upside-down, threatening their lives. Some of the men are left so broken they have to literally drag themselves into Kouassi’s office later, to be interrogated while lying on the floor, their bodies a mess of bruises, broken bones, and lacerations.