Acting
Francis Farge, alias "The American" could have remained a man like the others but a strange obsession animates him: he feels American body and soul.
Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.
A successful playwright reflects on his journey from his Armenian roots to adapting in France, forty years after his family's move to Marseilles. He now goes by a new name to fit in better with French society.
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After his father is killed, Djilali is sold by his family to a Lebanese terrorist group. After completing a grueling training process alongside five other boys, Djilali is chosen for a special assignment and sent to Paris to live with carefree Arab boy Karim, who is scheduled to meet the French president at a Christmas party. Djilali's mission is to impersonate Karim and kill the president, but his growing friendship with the happy youth gives him pause.
To be closer to his children following his divorce, Laurent Monier, a history and geography teacher in a peaceful provincial high school, accepts a position in a sensitive college in the Paris suburbs. He is assigned the hardest class, the fourth techno, and he finds an apartment in the Cité des Muriers, a particularly difficult district.
An ex-con suffering from terminal cancer and a suicidal ex-legionnaire are hired to participate in a staged assassination attempt on a Romanian politician. As part of the plan, the two must themselves be murdered in order to make their target appear more powerful. But while their circumstances make them perfect fall guys, their lives are initially spared when the attack descends into chaos. Staying alive thereafter involves the two strangers working together to dodge both fellow conspirators and the police.
Robert Millard has based his industrial kingdom - based on all the noise technologies - thanks to his marriage with the wealthy and cantankerous Irene, he blithely cheat for years. However, his last link with his pretty secretary, Eve, is the straw that broke the camel : Irene has indeed hired a detective-photographer, aptly named M.Colle order to have a maximum of incriminating shots. Threatened to divorce and thus to total ruin by his wife, the unfaithful husband should give up and dismiss Eve.
An orthodox Jewish teen living with her family in France attempts to balance her religious upbringing with her increasingly complex view of the outside world.
Hippolyte, the chef at the small Paris restaurant of the title, is losing his sense of smell - and without that, you can’t cook. Not in France. The restaurant has to close. Guests and customers of the ailing master chef gather for one last fabulous meal. Between courses, personal conflicts are explored and flashbacks flesh out incidents from the lives of the restaurant owners.
Inept policemen try to stop an amoral young duo on a spree of robbery and murder in France.
This a beautiful May evening. The sun has just set behind the hill. Tonight the inhabitants of the Le Corbusier housing unit are going to experience a slight change of program. They are all sitting in front of their TV sets and in twelve minutes the face of the new President of the Republic will appear on the screens..
Two teenage lovers are caught up in the thrill of forbidden love in this tragic romantic drama. Pierre (Jean-Pierre Andre) is a 16-year-old French lad who loves 14-year-old Djemila (Nadja Reski), the offspring of Algerian immigrants. Pierre's father is an Algerian war veteran who tolerates living with the immigrants at the low-income housing project as long as the two factions are separated. Djemila's older brother carries bitter hatred for the French over their invasion of Algeria. Both young lovers fall victim to the intolerance of their families when their relatives discover that the two are engaged in a passionate love affair.
In Paris, men are waiting for a possible daily job in an agency. Among them, two novices Jean-Pierre and Théo. They find themselves in the suburbs to make a regular move.
This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.
In the mist of the Algerian events, a man finds a fugitive happiness beside a local woman.
Malik, who grew up in Paris suburbs, dreams to move to Canada. Someone will give him a chance. But, when you are an unlucky guy by nature, it is hard to keep its chance.
A stubborn director who wants to rediscover the Algiers of his childhood comes up against the “Hollywood” fantasies of his characters, non-professionals all hoping to be able to become “someone else”, at least for the duration of a film… Mise en abyme for a journey into megalomania…
Inspired by the subject and by his wife's own phobia, Luc Moullet approaches this often-feared insect through the unique prisms of religion and sexuality in a daring essay.
Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.
