La Sept Cinéma

The year is 1949. One of the last outbreaks of Stalinist terror was a bloody buffoonery under the auspices of the fight against cosmopolitanism. In the Writers' House near Moscow, where a young writer finishes her story about her husband's arrest and death, there is a painful atmosphere of fear, suspicion, suspiciousness and foreboding that can drive you crazy...

Famous writer Alexander contracts a terminal illness. He receives a letter from his wife describing a summer day 30 years ago, and leaves his seaside home to remember his past. This journey will allow him to wander between the past and the present, and encounter unexpected people, allowing him to collect unforgettable memories in the final moments of his life.

A possible impostor torments a newly crowned medieval czar who may have ordered the real successor's death.

Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.

After a chaotic night of rioting in a marginal suburb of Paris, three young friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, wander around unoccupied waiting for news about the state of health of a mutual friend who has been seriously injured when confronting the police.

Shanghai, China, 1930. When young Shuisheng arrives from the countryside, his uncle Liushu puts him at the service of Bijou, the mistress of Laoda, supreme boss of the Tang Triad, constantly threatened by his enemies, both those he knows and those lurking in the shadows.

An exiled filmmaker finally returns to his home country where former mysteries and afflictions of his early life come back to haunt him once more.

The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a year and motivated by Birkin’s fortieth birthday—a milestone she admits to some anxiety over—Jane B. by Agnès V. contrasts the private, reflective Birkin with Birkin the icon.

Max is a former playboy who has decided to settle down by marrying his current love, Muriel. However, when Max catches a glimpse of the great lost love of his life, he becomes obsessed with rekindling their relationship.

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algiers, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Boualem works at night in a bakery and steals the loudspeaker that was installed on his roof and was broadcasting the Imam's word... therefore preventing him from sleeping. This blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...

Set in 1987 against the backdrop of a hunger strike by the Egyptian film industry, Chahine himself steps in to play Yehia, the famed Egyptian director whose life is chronicled in "Alexandria, Why?" and "An Egyptian Story". Obsessed with Amr, the handsome actor he discovered and cast as his alter-ego in parts one and two of The Alexandria Trilogy, Yehia pressures Amr to star in various film projects that change even as Yehia's perception of the young actor begins to change. He first casts Amr as Hamlet, which the actor deems too demanding for his talents, then as the lead in a musical biopic of demigod Alexander the Great, who founded the city of Alexandria in 332 B.C.

Ivan is old Russia: thick, dour, hard-working, often brutish; he misses Communism. He drives a taxi and one night meets Alexi, a new Russian, a musician, an alcoholic, irresponsible. Alexi stiffs Ivan for the fare, so Ivan tracks him down and a love-hate relationship ensues. When Alexi lets the bath water run over in Ivan's flat and Ivan must pay 500 rubles for repairs, he tries to force Alexi into day labor to repay him. It's hopeless. Then, suddenly, Alexi is discovered, goes on a jazz tour of America, becomes a celebrity, and returns in triumph. Ivan longs to renew the friendship, and it looks as if he may get what he wants.

A poor, rural Cambodian family slowly disintegrates during the cycle of a single rice crop.

Two interconnected stories in the 1930s, one set in Berlin, the other in Palestine: Mania Vilbouchevich Shohat (1880-1961), called Tania, a Russian Jew and revolutionary, goes from Minsk to Palestine to live on a collective. She promotes feminism and laments a shift in the men from self-defense to aggression. Her friend, Else Lasker-Schuler (1869 - 1945), expressionist poet and German Jew, is in Berlin, writing, caring for her son, watching Hitler's movement take power. She goes to Jerusalem and imagines a park for Arab and Jew. Her poems, voiced from within, capture her experience. The film meditates on the violence at the root of Israel's birth: of the Nazis and of the Zionists.

At house of Agathon get together many intellectuals and philosophers, including Socrates, to discuss the theme of love and sex: each of them intervenes to support its argument dialogical rules, within the context symposial.

Nanni Moretti takes another look at the ebbs and flows of life in April 1996, as he becomes a father for the first time and seems unable to focus on his documentary about the upcoming national elections.

A blind beggar is robbed of his chest of money. The theft leads to a dramatic situation in the street where he begs every day.

Scarlatti in Seville, a work that is part of the Opus series produced by Mildred Clary for the French National Audiovisual Institute where a series of performers talk about the musicians they play and the reason for their choice, jumps, insinuating much through the parallel montage, from the representation of the dark palace to a palm tree caressed by the wind in the Alcazar of Seville. And from there little more will be said about Scarlatti, whose signature we do not even know, but we will hear his music, mostly played by the German pianist Christian Zacharias, who will also talk about his obsession with the Italian composer's work.

The journey of Michael Padovic, an American professor who arrives with his wife, Helene, at a Portuguese convent where he expects to find the documents needed to prove his theory: Shakespeare was born in Spain; not in England.

Jean is young, gay, and promiscuous. Only after he meets one or two women, including Laura, does he come to realize his bisexuality. Jean has to overcome a personal crisis and a tough choice between Laura and his male lover Samy.