La Sept-Arte

In December of 1999, François organizes a retreat to a small island for himself, some friends, and their children to avoid the craziness of Paris during the turn of the millennium. Things quickly become tense between François and the young man who is the island's caretaker. Boredom and bickering add to the growing foreboding. By the end, will millennial noise in Paris seem mild in comparison to violence in the pastoral retreat?

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.

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

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

A Turkish consul travels to a Soviet city in the worst times of Stalinism. There, he falls in love with his secretary, a fervent communist.

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.

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.

A old red riding hood, badly crippled after killing a monster many years ago, comes up with a sinister plan to dance again.

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.

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 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 life of a twelve-year-old living with her mother is disrupted by the arrival of a very young man at home. While her feelings become confused and the dramas burst, the girl will try to find in his entourage someone able to listen and understand it, before the worst happens.

On a deserted island, an old caretaker with a waning memory wanders among the ruins of a former children’s prison, which was destroyed by a mutiny and a fire a long time ago.

This French drama takes a gentle poke at the youthful ideologies of the post-hippy 70's. Fabio and Alain are teenagers with widely differing backgrounds and philosophies. Fabio is a rebellious Stalin quoting, left-winger from a lower middle-class family. He dreams of being a rock star even though he can't play a note. Alain, a soft-spoken boy from a middle-class family prefers to quote Plato. Alain is attracted to Fabio's enthusiastic talk on political activism. When the local press accuses them of terrorism after they toss a rock through a window they are initially delighted. Their delight is short-lived when they realize that may be blamed for some of the real terrorism the town has been experiencing.

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.”

Part of the Cinéastes de notre temps series.

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.

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.

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.