Denis Gheerbrant

An intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre in Paris, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker’s home for more than 50 years.

A female scientist performs experiments on three college girls that turn them into drooling, murderous mutants.

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From cinema-verite; pioneers Albert Maysles and Joan Churchill to maverick movie makers like Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield, the world's best documentarians reflect upon the unique power of their genre. Capturing Reality explores the complex creative process that goes into making non-fiction films. Deftly charting the documentarian's journey, it poses the question: can film capture reality?

Jeanne is a woman who is driven by her very active conscience. She attempts to assuage her idealistic bent by trying out life as a nun, but this doesn't work out. After she leaves the convent, she takes a job at a factory, where the callousness of management spurs her to become a labor activist. Her efforts are marked by great persistence and fervor, but she lacks any kind of diplomacy or persuasiveness, and as the years progress, she manages to alienate everyone in her life. By the end of the film, there is only one way that she can see to resolve the horrible situation she finds herself in.

Max, a 40 years old gay, chases in railway stations. He takes his "prey" to the Parisian park, the Bois de Boulogne."Manège" will be the genesis for his later feature film "La chatte à deux têtes" (2002).

As he usually does, Denis Gheerbrant has left alone, with his camera and sound equipment. This time around he has decided to discover a country he has never visited before : Rwanda. The year is 2003, that is to say nearly ten years after the genocide. With the help of Déo, met in Kigali, who will be both his guide and his translator, the filmmaker meets the people who have survived,with only one objective in mind : trying to understand.

A hill in Kyrgyzstan inhabited by men, women, some children. Smoke, birds, a waste dump like a Leviathan. Among them, a traumatized former soldier, a grieving mother, young people deprived of a future, living and facing their destiny.

After committing a hit and run, a man insinuates himself into the lives of the victim's family.

Documentary film about the camps in the south of France, in which Spanish civil war refugees and the volunteers of the "international brigades", non-sedentary people and Alsatian and foreign Jews were interned from 1939 onwards. Under the Vichy regime, the camps were used to intern other criminalized population groups and French Jews, who were also deported from there to extermination camps. In a mosaic of artificially framed shots, formerly interned contemporary witnesses describe their own life stories. Director Mangiante not only sheds light on the history of the camps, but also the mechanisms of personal memory.

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A trip to the seaside campsites, along the coast from Spain to the Camargue, like the other side of society, a cleverly mixed deck of cards. Each time the filmmaker pitches his tent, he gets to know his neighbors. And, as is often the case in these cases, they tell a stranger what they wouldn't tell their relatives. They talk about themselves, about what matters to them.

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Cédric is a child like millions of others. The only difference is that the little boy is seriously ill and must spend six months in a hospital. Fortunately, the medical staff are well aware that Cédric, like other kids named Steve or Dolores, must - above all else - live his child's life.

A question of identity? First of all what they claim: their city, their Kabylie, their 20 years. Young people from immigrant backgrounds, Farid, Naguib and Abdel Ouab Taalba claim all the more clearly their desire to be young: to be themselves. At the time when they may be summoned to declare their identity, they say let us our questions. Their place? It's a diary of immigrant youth, a boxing gym, a faculty, but also the suburban commute, the trip to Kabylia. The shooting of the film? It was during six months, the young people and the filmmaker, alone with the image and the sound. The time for questions to arise.

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A horde of wild horses, historians who sing songs of the colonial war against the Russian empire, young people dancing on a public square, villagers cobbling together their own museum : in a small Caucasian republic, a whole people remembers. And, all along, the painter Rouslan Tsrimov guides us into the way of living and the thoughts of the Nartes, the mythical ancestors, as recounted by their saga.

7 films by Denis Gheerbrant. La République Marseille leads us through seven worlds that make up a city and give it the aspect of a republic: the world of dockers, activist workers, women in the garden projects or the inhabitants of an enormous ghetto, and, in all its nooks and crannies, ready to encounter all kinds of people, from an ex-junkie, a boxer, or young women on the brink of life. The Republic, a main street in the middle of the city. Confronted by a brutal real estate operation, all these stories come into play again.

They tell us about the childhood that is going away, about the city that scares us and that makes us envious. They talk about good and evil, religion and school results. They are in fifth grade and live the age when one is born into the world. Denis Gheerbrant was able to capture, to arouse the word, between childhood and adolescence, between life in the neighborhood, at home and at school. Filmed in Gennevilliers, in an environment known to be difficult, the film holds up a mirror to us through singular conversations that reveal a surprising maturity in the face of the challenge represented by the entry into adolescence, and further into society.