William Lubtchansky

A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

A wonderful documentary that sheds additional light on the fascinating project ‘Inferno’ was, as well as how those who were involved with it reacted to it during the shooting process. A riveting adjunct to the main feature, offering a glut of interviews with various people associated with the production, and presenting quite a bit more production data, as well as some unseen footage from Clouzot's shoot.

A powerful new film about Jan Karski, the Polish resistance figure who attempted to expose the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec, and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot's production of L'Enfer came to a halt. Despite huge expectations, major studio backing and an unlimited budget, after three weeks the production collapsed. This documentary presents Inferno's incredible expressionistic original rushes, screen tests, and on-location footage, whilst also reconstructing Clouzot's original vision, and shedding light on the ill-fated endeavor through interviews, dramatizations of unfilmed scenes, and Clouzot's own notes.

A celebrity is caught by her husband with a young lover.

General Montriveau, having returned from the Napoleonic Wars in despair, quickly becomes enamored with Duchess Langeais. Across a series of nocturnal visitations, the Duchess mercilessly toys with her hot-tempered suitor, as the machinations of a shadowy conspiracy unfold in the background.

When he loses his position as a powerful government minister, Vincent is dropped by his pretty mistress and must begin life anew, without the privileges of power. As he gradually becomes acquainted with milieus which he d either forgotten or never known and a host of sometimes eccentric, often remarkable everyday people, Vincent really begins to start living again.

1968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

Julien is a clockmaker with destructive impulses who decides to blackmail Madame X, a rich, attractive woman who traffics in stolen antiques. What he doesn’t know is that she has an even more dangerous secret that leads him to Marie, with whom he had fallen in love a year earlier.

Bruno, a communist newspaper journalist, is suffering a mid-life crisis. Torn between his wife Gaëlle and his young girlfriend Nathalie, his political beliefs battered by the wind of history, Bruno seems to have lost his bearings.

A story told quietly of Vincent a welder at a large and seemingly toxic plant along the Rhône, living in a village with his sons, wife, and mother, saying little to each other.

After finding love and success in Italy, French actress Camille returns to Paris, the city she fled 3 years ago. She secretly dreads confronting her ex-boyfriend Pierre. Her new lover Ugo also has a secret, he’s meeting with the intriguing Dominique while on his quest for an unpublished manuscript.

Nicholas is the eldest son of a wealthy suburban family, whose businesswoman mother makes deals from a helicopter and has an affair with her business partner. His cheerful, alcoholic father, on the other hand, is reduced to a prisoner in his room with his devoted dog and electric train set. Unbeknownst to his parents, Nicholas works as a window cleaner and dish washer in a Parisian cafe. He is also in love with the daughter of another cafe's owner, who, however, has an abusive boyfriend. One night, Nicholas sneaks a few drunken drifters into his family wine cellar and his father unexpectedly takes a liking to the stranger.

A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

The idea for this film about a generation and its lost ideals came to Romain Goupil after attending several funerals of friends in the fall of 1996, where the '68 generation, now in influential positions in media or politics, kept meeting each other. It seemed as if the revolution that they had tried to make was being buried with each coffin. A MORT LA MORT is in some ways an homage to this generation, now in their fifties. They were a privileged generation that thought that they could change the world, doing everything that their parents failed to do. There were no actual deaths in France as there were in Germany or Italy, but the system was not ideal for personal issues or for love. There was always a scapegoat for the injustices of the world, be it capitalism or imperialism. That way the blame could be placed somewhere else. Some of the '68 generation are still faithful to the principles of their youth and still continue to fight for the illusions of the past.

An interview with a WWII Red Cross official who wrote a glowing report on a Jewish ghetto-cum-death camp.

This French romantic comedy-drama concerns Claude Langmann, a middle-aged auctioneer, who is in a loving marriage with his second wife of 15 years. Though he is deeply in love with his wife and has remained faithful to her, he finds himself unable to perform in bed. His wife says she is satisfied with Claude's love and tenderness, but he visits a sex specialist anyway. There he learns of Viagra, which is not yet approved in France, though it is available in Switzerland over the counter. Soon Claude is on his way to Geneva, and eager to prove his manhood, tries to bed Agnes, his very attractive and very available assistant. His daughter, who also comes along for the trip, interferes with her own problems.

After scientist Sylvie discovers her brother Paul trying to steal a gun from her lab, he explains that he wishes to avenge the death of their father whom he suspects died at the hands of his business partner.

Tristan is about to turn fifteen. He enjoys the good life his parents have built for him. And yet, it won't be long before his environment of protection, affection and comfort crumbles. From then on, he will learn the taste of loneliness, sadness and that survival is often more important than life.

A witty, despairing French-Russian-Italian-Swiss art movie set in 16th-century Georgia, Stalinist Georgia, contemporary Georgia, and contemporary Paris, featuring the same set of actors in all four settings.

A young boy who worships all things American comes of age in Orleans, where over 14,000 American GIs were stationed.

Joan has succeeded in lifting the siege on Orléans and Charles VII has been ordained King of France. However, she is injured in her failed attempt to take Paris, weakening her position at court. When she is finally captured and put on trial, she finds both her life and the sanctity of her body at stake.

Jeanne the Maid leaves her childhood home in Domremy after hearing what she is sure was the voice of God. She believes that she can help lead France to victory on the battlefield, and she persuades Charles, dauphin of France to allow her to guide his troops.

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?

One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.

Châtelaine Marie-Agnès de Bayonnette lives in her family home with her cousin Solange. The lives of the two old ladies are governed by the traditional codes of aristocracy. When Marie-Agnès died, the heirs from Russia had to fight over the estate with a Japanese company that wanted to buy the property.

A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him.

More than just an abbreviated form of "La Belle Noiseuse", Rivette re-cut his footage with some important differences in point of view - this one being more from Marianne's point of view

The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on a countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model.

Marcel Spadice is a famous writer with a criminal background and a penchant for handsome men. From time to time, he induces an attractive female admirer to arrange for him to be introduced to nice, talented young men who happen to be sufficiently handsome to interest him. At other times, the endless effort to woo these men (who are most often heterosexual) grows wearying, and he goes to the train station to pick up soldiers looking for some easy money and a night's lodging. In this film, the writer has grown enamored with a young circus laborer who wants to move up in the world, literally, by becoming a tightrope walker. Marcel cadges an introduction, and for a time sponsors the young man's training. However, when the boy suffers an accident which renders him unfit for his chosen vocation, Marcel loses interest in him and takes up with another young man.

Marc, a troubled teenager, is bored in his native, depressing city of Sete. One day, a simple phone call makes him aware of the existence of Stephanie, a sister he has never met. Armed with a pistol his mother found, he goes out to find her. He steals money from a perfume shop, and is then stopped by a policeman who wants to search him. In the car, Marc threatens the policeman with his gun, demanding that he helps him find his sister...

Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?

One of the great masterpieces of world literature comes to vivid life in an elaborate production from acclaimed theater and film innovator Peter Brook. This collection of ancient Sanskrit stories (composed into the longest book ever written) comprises a series of enlightened fables at the heart of countless beliefs, legends, and teachings; indeed, its very title means "the great story of mankind." Brook and writer Jean-Claude Carriere worked for eight years to develop this epic concerning two sides of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, whose struggle leads to a fascinating voyage of emotions, passion and vision of glory. Briefly, the Mahabharata is a tale of two rival sets of brothers, cousins to eachother, each born into royalty and with divinely guided paths in life. The result, however, is a great war, death, destruction - a vast epic.

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod Des Empedokles’.

During a ceremony in an orthodox church in Paris, a 40-year-old writer and journalist is seduced by a young man, whom with she will live an extraordinary story of love and passion that will drive them to madness.

Jeanne Quester is a psychologist-on-the-airwaves in a radio station. She got a raw deal when she was a child.

Amanda Weber is a museum employee. Her nephew, Victorien, who feels that wild animals should not be kept in zoos, while hitchhiking saw a mysterious bus with 50 dead tourists that later was found by autorities at the bottom of a lake. When Victorien gets in very serious problems due to what he saw Amanda seeks to find out what happened and soon also becomes a target.

Emmanuel, 37, lives in Paris with his wife, Irene, and his daughter Anne, 14 years old. He accidentally discovers that Irene is receiving mail in the remaining mail. She refuses to follow Emmanuel to Italy where he has to write a biography of Filippo Lippi. Distraught, Emmanuel decided to leave immediately for Florence.

Pierre is the artistic director of a theater, and when his daughter Manon lets him know that she is coming to see him after a year's absence, Pierre decides to prepare for the meeting. He goes to the theater with his girlfriend Ariane and has the actresses in his troupe act out different aspects of his daughter's character. Unfortunately, this is not adequate preparation, for when Manon does show up, nothing goes quite as he imagined...

In a port city, a youth plays a computer game that determines the fate of a woman (whose interracial romance is threatened by white punks) and other residents.

Mise-en-scène of the classic tragedy of Sofocles, carried out by Antoine Vitez in the National Theatre of Chaillot

Claude Lanzmann directed this 9½ hour documentary on the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since they only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing, by asking for the most minute details, is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive and well in many people who still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.

To salve his guilty conscience an elder brother removes his disturbed younger sibling from a mental institution after a suicide attempt and tries to bring him back to mental competency through one on one contact. Free of the institution he continues to be haunted by dreams of a lost twin and chants the eerie phrase "Do I stand before the king?" It is the elder brother that seems doomed to lose himself in his brother's insanity.

Edouard is patriarch of a large family: his second wife, Jeanne, has just had a baby and finally had enough of his philandering. As the marriage between them unravels, Edouard's daughters experience their own emotional shock waves. Dina, in a relationship with playwright Paul, wants more from her daily life, while Sidone is married to a fellow musician but is terrified of performing in public. Fast-forward seven years: Edouard is gravely ill, and the family shares their issues, hopes and fears.

A fashionable playwright-director offers roles to two young actresses. Shortly after accepting, the actresses notice strange clauses in their contract – namely they must live at the director’s large appartment during rehearsals. Soon thereafter, the mysteries, hallucinations and rivalries begin.

French cybernetics genius Victor Frankenstein carries on the work of his notorious ancestor and creates a monster, albeit one with a penchant for philosophy, etiquette and occasional bouts of murderous rage. But when the creature develops a hunger for l'amour, Frankenstein and his understanding fiancé use a cache of freshly murdered strippers to build the creature a beautiful yet dutiful bride. Can the undead find true love in a cold world, or will the French ways of passion unleash some monstrous surprises upon them all?

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organised crime into real estate development there: crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early 1980s. In the fictionalised story, Paula Barretto is caught in this underworld because her father was involved in the drug business, her brother is in the real estate scam, and her lover is an armed thief. Although she tries to get out of her corrupt and dangerous environment, it is not an easy task when even the police officers cannot be trusted, and the underworld has informants everywhere.

An innocent man stumbles across a political intrigue, when he discovers that his neighbours apartment is bugged. They are then found dead and their killers description resembles the man.

Scandal in the property business.

Marie is just out from prison when she runs into Baptiste, a young paranoid needing companionship. In their pursuit of a mysterious briefcase carried by Marie's former lover, they roam the street of Paris, transformed into a giant board game, a maze spotted with mysterious traps, puzzling clues, and chance encounters. Maybe they are bricks in some sinister scheme, maybe they are playing a board game, maybe it's a fairy tale, maybe it's yet something else...

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

The time is the 1930s and two Soviet spies (both Frenchmen by nationality) have been helping Communist factions during the Civil War in Spain. It is the time of Stalin's iron rule in the USSR, and the two agents are suddenly called to Moscow by the KGB. Knowing that they are in trouble for no fault of their own, fear drives one of them to suicide while the other gets his lover and her child and begins a run for his life, knowing that the KGB will never let him go free.

New Yorker Ben Phillips and mysterious Léo Hoffmann are strangers who are summoned to Paris by a mutual acquaintance. Upon arrival, they meet and soon find themselves tangled in a complex mystery.

Madame Jouve, the narrator, tells the tragedy of Bernard and Mathilde. Bernard was living happily with his wife Arlette and his son Thomas. One day, a couple, Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard, moves into the next house. This is the accidental reunion of Bernard and Mathilde, who had a passionate love affair years ago. The relationship revives... A somber study of human feelings.

In this eerie, atmospheric tale, a young woman is on a train when she sees some people she thinks she knows from her childhood. On arriving home, her husband tells her that a certain countess has died. At that point, the film cuts to a scene of the countess singing in a mausoleum while the visual image of the graveyard's many tombstones passes before one's eyes. Back home, the husband -- also a "father-figure" -- is looking over his collection of wooden angels. Some time elapses, and he surreptitiously sees a thief come down through the chimney, steal some things, and then leave. To combat any recurrence, he builds an iron, escape-proof cage around the fireplace, and then goes away on a trip. When he comes back, he finds the thief dead in the cage. Thus far, the camera has only shown the husband in profile or from the back. Then there is another story about a young girl, with a spiteful, nasty mother, who is trying to cope with her own attraction to a man.

This drama about a barmaid caught up in events beyond her control is the first film directed by Juliet Berto, and was also based on her own concept for the story. The barmaid, played by Berto, has been trying to take care of Bobby, a teenage drug pusher who is in over his head. Before she can put him back on track and get him out of the drug underworld, the young man is killed while being chased by a narcotics agent. Depressed by his death but not derailed, she finds herself trying to help out a gay user who depended on Bobby for his supply of drugs. She decides to procure some drugs for the desperate addict, and is trapped in the bathroom of a bar - with the drugs - when narcotics agents burst upon the scene. Her boyfriend rushes to help her but is killed by an agent who shoots first and thinks later. The barmaid does not face a very optimistic future as the narc arrests her - but releases a parish minister who had been helping her find a source for the drugs.

A short film that can act as a companion piece to Le Pont du Nord.

A look at the sexual and professional lives of three people—a television director, his ex-girlfriend, and a sex worker.

When her mother dies, a teenage girl decides to find her long-absent sailor father. Together with her five-year-old brother, she begins a long and dangerous quest, which will finally be rewarded.

In this thriller, a UNESCO translator stumbles across a group which is hiding and supporting Nazis and facilitating their travel around the world. She had been given an assignment to study the work of a writer who recently had died, and the conspiracy is revealed in materials he left behind. She comes upon a young man who is going through the writer's papers, and she immediately assumes he must be one of the conspirators. However, he soon convinces her of his innocence in that regard, and the two together begin a search for the ringleader.

A tribute to Mallarmé that not only asserts the continuing relevance of his work but also confronts its literary ambiguities with political and cinematic ambiguities of its own. In outline, the film could not be more straightforward: it offers a recitation of one of Mallarmé’s most celebrated and complex poems (it was his last published work in his own lifetime, appearing in 1897, a year before his death) and proposes a cinematic equivalent for the author’s original experiment with typography and layout by assigning the words to nine different speakers, separating each speaker from the other as she or he speaks, and using slight pauses to correspond with white spaces on the original page.

Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.

The Daughter of the Moon battles the Daughter of the Sun over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on Earth, specifically in modern day Paris.

A film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.

After her brother was killed by a notorious all-female pirate gang, Morag dedicates her life to bringing the murderers to justice. Soon, she has become an important member of the pirate gang and has begun acquiring the loyalty of key members. Eventually, she makes her move and challenges the leader, a demi-god, known as "The Daughter of the Sun."

Emerging from a lengthy dinner where his mother was exhibited without restraint for the favor of a man, Daniel returns alone, sickened. Without imagining the trap closes on him, he later agrees to have a drink with a neighbor he just help carry packages. She "vamp" and keeps her house without a very fierce resistance opposes too happy to escape his solitude. Taking advantage of the absence of his mother, Daniel finally leaves the high school and moved to the neighbor who, having close to her more often, gets him a place in the clinic where she is employed.

Jean-Luc Godard mixes video and film in his Grenoble studio, discussing how he secured funding for the film. The action unfolds on two monitors, as a young working-class couple lives in a claustrophobic, high-rise apartment complex and marital discord is set off by the wife’s infidelity.

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.

Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living.

When the police find Simone seated near her husband's corpse it is predictable that she is charged with the murder. Jean-Pierre Laubray is appointed counsel for the defence. He begins an inquiry into the case and he finds out that the murdered man had killed a barman in a robbery the night before. He finds out as well he was a leg-man of Cristiani's for his election campaign. He tries to contact Juliette, Cristiani's daughter, and he discovers that Bruno, Juliette's brother, also died that same night in a car accident...

A father plans to kill in the same day the nine members of the jury who condemned his son to death.

The film narrates a utopian abandonment, consensual and festive of the market economy and high productivity. The population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with "We stop everything" and the second "After a total downtime will be revived-reluctantly-that the services and products including lack will prove intolerable. Probably: water to drink, electricity for reading at night, the TSF to say "This is not the end of the world, this is an 01, and now a page of Celestial Mechanics". The implementation of these resolutions is the first day of a new era, Year 01. The Year 01 is emblematic of the challenge of the 1970s and covers such diverse topics as ecology, negation of authority, free love, communal living, rejection of private property and labor.

Catherine and Marcello are secluded in their house, living under the candlelight. Unable to accept the injustice behind the loss of their nine-month-old baby, they face a slow but definite self-destruction.

This is rural France. It's the summer of 1943, the weather is fine and sunny and life is sweet. On one of these beautiful days, Nanette, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl, meets a slightly injured young man near the farm she lives on. Her life is about to change forever.

An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests. The picture consists of two parts, each with with identical image tracks, and differing narration.

Images and poems of the celebrated couple Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Elsa’s youth as recalled by Aragon, with commentary by Elsa.

After a road accident, a writer, Edgar, and his wife, Mylène, take up residence on an island off the coast of France to recuperate. Edgar soon recovers from his injuries and begins writing his next novel, seeking inspiration from the local people. His wife, however, has lost her voice and can only communicate through written notes. The islanders grow suspicious of the reclusive couple, their unease soon turning to aggression. Edgar is equally anxious about his neighbors, particularly a solitary widower, Ducasse, who has taken charge of a large consignment of crates. What secret project is Ducasse engaged in – and can it explain the strange behavior of the islanders?

An illegal gambling den where players can lose millions... and the owners make their fortune.