Ferdinand Grandrieux

Movies

Despite the Night
Music
We enter the film like into a dream. Paris. Lenz looks for Madeleine who has mysteriously disappeared. He encounters Hélène, a young woman bewitched by her self-destructive impulses. A crazy love develops between them. Louis and Léna, devoured by their jealousy, lead Lenz to follow, against his better wishes, Hélène into the subterranean world of a dark sexual exploitation network. Although lost, lost from the first, love is what saves us.
It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve - Masao Adachi
Music
The first in a planned series of films about radical filmmakers by film critic Nicole Brenez and filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve is a portrait of Masao Adachi, who emerged during the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s as a screenwriter for Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu, and directed a series of avant-garde films that grafted radical politics to the sexploitation genre. A 1971 visit to a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) training camp while on the way back from Cannes resulted in Adachi's most infamous film, the agit-prop documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, which he co-directed with Wakamatsu. Soon after, Adachi joined a splinter cell of the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, where he stayed from 1974 until he was deported to Japan in 1997 to serve time for passport violations.