Bernard Zitzermann

A film-crew in the early twentieth century, the cabaret known as ‘Le Fol Espoir’ has been transformed into an amateur soundstage. The motion picture tells the story of a ship and its passengers – from the famous opera singer down to the petty criminal. The film is an optimistic political fable intended to educate the masses. There’s comedy aplenty – slapstick punches, custard pies and gags reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle; there’s adventure, high drama moments of great bravura , and passionate love stories. The filming begins on June 28th 1914, the day of the Archiduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo, the gunpowder that sets Europe alight. It ends with news of another assassination – that of Jean Jaures on July 31st followed by the general conscription of August 1st, heralded by church bells across France. The allegory of the shipwreck is filmed at breakneck pace during the last five weeks before war breaks out.

Cyril and Fiona, a free-wheeling married couple, travel to a tropical coastal town to follow their sexual fantasies. Cyril is a manipulator. There, they meet another couple, Catherine and Hugh, and their three children. Hugh is a one-armed photographer who specializes in nude photographs of peasant women. Soon, they decide to live together and an erotic atmosphere develops between them.

In Victorian England, wealthy patriarch Sir Harald Alabaster invites an impoverished biologist, William Adamson, into his home. There, William tries to continue his work, but is distracted by Alabaster's seductive daughter, Eugenia. William and Eugenia begin a torrid romance, but as the couple become closer, the young scientist begins to realize that dark, disturbing things are happening behind the closed doors of the Alabaster manor.

Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for an upper-class French family, finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.

An irritable and stressed-out hotel manager begins to develop paranoid delusions about his wife's infidelity.

Based on Lord Byron's poem "Mazeppa" from 1819 and revolving around the painter Théodore Géticault, famous horse trainer and spectacle Bartabas takes art to another level.

Two men face the consequences of gambling after playing with men beyond their league.

This series, assembled in a film, presents the singular view of contemporary artists on major works of art history. The words of these free spirits make each work see each work as a dynamic form, in the process of becoming, crossed by multiple energies. The artists' voice-over narration frees the creative possibilities of the image - sound and image playing with each other, animated by the same spring: what is seeing?

Olivier, the nine-year-old son of Elisabeth and Serge, a country veterinarian, vanishes one afternoon on the way to his grandmother's house. The emotional aftermath of his disappearance sends his father packing and nearly destroys his mother.

Drunk, Betty is feeling worse and worse, the previous evening is slowly coming back to her: her husband and her husband's family had criticized her harshly, had sent her away. But Betty hadn't wanted to get married in the first place. She knows that she always ruined everything, that she drinks to much, that she has had several affairs. Laure, who is taking care of her, suggests that Betty stay with her in the hotel where she lives, as long as Betty would like. Laure, too, finds solace and companionship in alcohol.

Although he was once a colonel in Argentina, the principal character in this film is now a wealthy exile living in Paris with his beloved wife, who has been unable to bear children. To fill this void in their lives, he feeds and clothes abandoned children, raising them in his mansion as if they were his own. As would never be the case in real life today, in this fantasized story set in 1925, no one objects to this behavior, and they live pleasantly and enjoyably together. Things grow considerably more animated when a stage magician places his very attractive daughter in the colonel's household, which stirs a lively romantic interest from his boys and from the great man himself.

A farce, Hoskins plays a photographer who specializes in religious pictures who searches for a model for Jesus. He does a favor for a friend and finds himself doing a voice track for a porno movie with Natasha Richardson. Hoskins finds his model for Jesus in Jeff Goldblum and a romantic triangle begins in which Goldblum finds adoring crowds believing him to be Jesus and then begins to believe it himself.

Marc, a young snake expert, works at a museum in Geneva. He loves snakes, to the point that he owns many and even takes a bath with his huge pet python. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Malenka, who is the assistant--and mistress--of an older herpetologist professor. Marc discovers that not only is the "professor" a fraud but also a dangerous psychotic who had at one time seduced Marc's mother, and Marc believes that the longer Malenka stays with him, the greater danger she's in.

A history of the French Revolution from the decision of the king to convene the Etats-Generaux in 1789 in order to deal with France's debt problem. The first part of the movie tells the story from 1789 until August 10, 1792 (when the King Louis XVI lost all his authority and was put in prison). The second part carries the story through the end of the terror in 1794, including the deaths by guillotine of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, and Desmoulins.

The name of painter Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) is synonymous for a kind of painting style which celebrates carefree romantic life, indoors and out. He was a painter during the final decades of the French monarchy. In this story, he and his brother Cyprien (Robin Renucci), who is an early pioneer in medical anatomy (he dissected corpses and made drawings of what he found in them), have fallen in love with the same woman, Marianne (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), a laundress. This attraction has not escaped the notice of Salmon d'Anglas (Sami Frey), a conniving nobleman, who has his heart set on getting revenge on Jean-Honore (Joachim de Almeida) for refusing his patronage and becoming the darling of the French court.

Directed by Philippe de Broca, the film recounts a bloody episode of the French Revolution. 1793, the Terror . In Vendée and in Bretagne, the chouans are revolting against the young Republic and fight for the monarchy restauration. The civil war divides also the family of the Count Savinien de Kerfadec, a liberal and generous noble and a flying machines inventor.

The residents of a remote Swiss mountain village come to believe an ancient oracle in this drama taken from the novel by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. With news of the Spanish Civil War on the radio, the people begin to believe the sun will not return and the world will be forever darkened.

Dr. Paul Calmet is dead. His son Jean again feels the familiar feeling of anguish caused by his father; victim of this torture, he is carrying the virus of misfortune.

The dream, which filled half of her life, was no longer enough for Maryvonne. She leaves her husband, child, lover and leaves for Paimpol. And there, it's a breath of fresh air in the form of real life, reality finally joins the dream.

In 1856, fresh from life with nuns in an orphanage school, Alexina Barbin comes to a coastal village in La Rochelle to teach the village girls. She is deeply religious. She shares the classroom and a bedroom with the young and vivacious Sara, with whom she falls in love. Alexina has another secret: her gender is mysterious. She and Sara begin a scandalous love affair, but Alexina seeks marriage and social acceptance. She discloses her secrets to the village priest, to her mother, to the bishop, and to the bishop's physician. After the church and court rule on her petition, marriage to Sara becomes Alexina's sole purpose and hope.

Madeleine, who runs a disco on the French-Swiss border, dreams of going to Paris to pursue a singing career. Her lover, Paul, who makes his living smuggling money, gold and goods across the border, plans to emigrate to Canada. Mali, a pretty young Algerian woman who lives in France and works in Switzerland, would like to be anywhere except where she is. Louis, born on a Swiss farm and trained as a clockmaker, would give anything to leave his mistress, Lucie, and move in with Mali.

A beautiful DJ starts a romantic relationship with an older antiquarian. The only problem: she's pregnant and already hitched.

Detective Frank Zodiac is a cop traumatized by the death of his wife in a car accident that also left his daughter in a coma. This tragedy prevented him from being present to apprehend the dangerous gangster Gus Sabor, who was then able to escape from law enforcement. Three years later, Frank and Gus' paths cross again. Frank then sets out to pursue the criminal through Paris.

After a train accident, a woman survives and is mistaken for an other woman she just met on a train before the accident.

Guy is fired from is job, and asks to stay with his friend and his girlfriend in their apartment. The longer he stays, the more disaster he creates.

The scene is the restless Paris of the interwar years where an attractive and ambitious woman successfully makes her way in a world previously reserved for men: that of high finance. Originating from a humble background, she quickly becomes popular with small savers by offering them outstanding interest rates. Extremely popular, she makes no secret of her taste for the good things in life and her homosexual affairs. They will cost her dearly...

Julien, fifteen-year-old, meets Nathalie, a girl his age whom he falls in love. Soon she is expecting a child. Their parents take the news with reservations. The baby will come and with it, the difficult learning of life.

Françoise has gone into business seducing men whose wives want to divorce them, and who need incriminating evidence against them. In addition, she has a little blackmail operation going on on the side with politicians who can't afford a scandal. She got started on this business after she was raped, and hasn't looked back since. Now the police are on her trail, and she avails herself of the services of a couple who make a profession of hiding wanted criminals. At the hideout, she meets Simon, a second-generation mobster. As the police close in, Françoise and Simon go on the run together, pulling off occasional heists for operating money. Before long, they have also fallen in love.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin is raised by his father and his grandfather because his mother dies when he's still very little. He works as a handyman, studies the law at a university and travels the country as an actor before he becomes the celebrated playwright Molière who impresses firstly the Duke of Orleans and then even King Louis XIV.

Directed by French author Geroges Perec, Les Lieux d'une fugue is an autobiographical account of the writer's experience of running away from his aunt's house at age 11. As much a meditation on the streets of Paris as it is personal narrative, Les Lieux d'une fugue examines how Perec's verbal games play out alongside a movie camera.

"In this heady, phantasmagoric fairy tale, a young girl comes face to face with a friendly dragon and a magnanimous witch. Upon the witch granting the girl’s wish to become a young woman, this surrealist chronicle follows the precocious Camélia on a series of quests in pursuit of love. Niki de Saint Phalle’s sophomore film revels in the sexual decadence that defined the 1970s zeitgeist, showcasing scenes of debauched harems and totemic worship of phallic sculptures. An astounding piece of directorial bravery, UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT confirms Saint Phalle’s wicked yet earnest pleasure in excavating the underlying perversions at play within the romantic quiet of fairy tales." - Anthology Film Archives

It takes place in a chic milieu, where both the father and the son are in love with the au pair girl (but she sleeps with the dad). The young student is far from the post May 68 clichés and the movie walks a fine line off the beaten path. Philippe Lemaire and Emmanuelle Riva are ideally cast as the bourgeois parents who urge their offspring to attend the grandma's Christmas meal.

A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.