Daniel Mesguich

Following a fall during mistletoe picking, Druid Getafix decides that it is time to secure the future of the village. Accompanied by Asterix and Obelix, he undertakes to travel the Gallic world in search of a talented young druid to transmit the Secret of the Magic Potion.

In a series of long interviews, 12 prime ministers talk about their experience in the upper echelons of power. The function of prime minister, torn between the president and the parliament, appointed without necessarily being elected but responsible for everything, is at the center of debate. With the exception of Jacques Chirac (1974-1976 and 1986-1988), deliberately left out because of his image as French President, those who governed France for the past 35 years agreed to discuss the exercise of power, as seen through archive footage, but also how they experienced it personally. Filmed in the same studio and sitting in the same chair, 12 French prime ministers talk freely about their time in office, from their appointment until their resignation.

Escorted by his valet Sganarelle, Dom Juan, a libertine gentleman, brave and hypocritical, seduces women, fights duels, denies his father's authority, and mocks Heaven. Carried away by his passion for women and gambling, he goes so far as to commit perjury. A classic revisited by Mesguich with a lot of visual effects: special effects, magic tricks, imposing sets. A playful staging for this tragi-comic play.

Escorted by his valet Sganarelle, Dom Juan, a libertine gentleman, brave and hypocritical, seduces women, fights duels, denies his father's authority, and mocks Heaven. Carried away by his passion for women and gambling, he goes so far as to commit perjury. A classic revisited by Mesguich with a lot of visual effects: special effects, magic tricks, imposing sets. A playful staging for this tragi-comic play.

Adolphe 'Dolfo' Rashevski travels to Israel with grandson Ric, but his brother, orthodox rabbi Samuel 'Shmouel, refuses to come attend their fellow Auschwitz survivor sister Rosa's funeral. Back in their home, the whole well-integrated family and their 'gojim' (non-Jewish and would-be) partners regularly wrestle with the meaning of Jewish blood, traditions and religion. For one it seems the way to gain a wife, for others the bomb under or the obstacle for a marriage. Yet love tends to conquer all but death.

Young D'Artagnan seeks to join the legendary musketeer brigade and avenge his father's death - but he finds that the musketeers have been disbanded.

The year is 1898. Héloïse, 9 years old, comes from a family belonging to the anti-Dreyfus and anti-Semitic Parisian high bourgeoisie. In a spirit of revolt, she begins a love affair with Maxime, a young Jewish journalist. During a terrible quarrel with her father, the latter suffers a stroke and dies. To get her away from Maxime, her mother Mathilde and her cousin Olympe take Héloïse on a trip to the Orient. After Cairo and the Pyramids, they go up the Nile and cross the desert in a caravan.

Iranian Iradj Azimi directed this French historical drama re-creating events depicted in the famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). The ill-fated voyage of the frigate Medusa begins when it departs Rochefort for Senegal in 1816. After striking a sandbar off the African coast, 150 civilians row safely to shore, but Captain Chaumareys (Jean Yanne) orders 140 soldiers and sailors onto a raft (minus supplies) and has it cut loose. Only 14 survive from the 140, creating a scandal back in France. Gericault (Laurent Terzieff) later talks to three of the survivors while researching his painting. Work on this film began in 1987, but sets destroyed by Hurricane Hugo caused delays, so the film was not completed until 1990. However, it then remained undistributed until an incident in which writer-director Azimi slashed his wrists in front of French Ministry of Culture officials.

Edward is an editor in a small English publishing house. The story concerns what happens when he receives a very good manuscript from Nicholas, an old friend, who up until now has been a hack writer. The manuscript sheds light on events both men lived through, and Edward comes to the conviction that it reveals that it was Nicholas who raped the woman Edward loved, and that he is therefore responsible for her subsequent suicide. Very carefully, he plots his revenge.

In 1894, the French Army discovered the existence of a traitor Alsatian and Jewish, the French officer Alfred Dreyfus makes an ideal culprit. For lack of evidence, the War Ministry creates a damning document Dreyfus overwhelming. Judged and sentenced, Dreyfus is deported to Devil's Island. In 1896, the Army flushed out the real culprit. The truth broke out in 1898 thanks to the mobilization of intellectuals shaken by Zola's "J'accuse!"

His wife having recently died, Thomas Jefferson accepts the post of United States ambassador to pre-revolutionary France, though he finds it difficult to adjust to life in a country where the aristocracy subjugates an increasingly restless peasantry. In Paris, he becomes smitten with cultured artist Maria Cosway, but, when his daughter visits from Virginia accompanied by her attractive slave, Sally Hemings, Jefferson's attentions are diverted.

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

Marivaudages of a privileged group embarked on the "Narcissus" for a musical cruise in company of the famous diva La Doria.

A woman is detained at La Conciergerie. She's 37 but her hair are already white. She's suffering from terrible haemorraghe. Her name is Marie-Antoinette of Lorraine, from Austria, and she's living her last four days.

A movie about the volatile marriage between artist Nils Dardel and Thora Klinckowström.

The neglected daughter of an industrialist who made his fortune in explosives supplies during the war and of a mother who was mostly concerned with herself, Monique Lerbier is a pretty blonde with generous but strong ideas and a hard character. She has chosen to be an atheist since her adolescence and does not tolerate injustice and social hypocrisy. She was to be married to an engineer, Lucien Vigneret. It was an arranged marriage, the dowry having to allow Vigneret to enter the capital of his father's company, which needed it to finance its business. But two weeks before the wedding, Monique surprises the fiancé with a mistress.

The setting is Les Fauvettes School for Girls just after WWI, where sternly Teutonic headmistress Ingrid Caven vies with Catherine Jourdan, a morphine addicted, fabric fetishist gym teacher, for the sexual favours of liquid eyed nymphet Scyluna. Meanwhile the chaplain conducts a nude exorcism.

Claire's handbag is stolen. It contained a letter written ten years previously by the man who is now the French President. In the letter he urges his pregnant mistress to have an abortion. Claire immediately alerts the President's men. From that moment, the machinery of state swings into action.

Walter is told by his boss, Sara, to deliver an urgent letter to Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a beautiful woman he had been eying in a nightclub, lying in the road, bound up. He takes her to a villa to get a doctor, and ends up being locked in a bedroom with her. While she is making love to him, he has visions of surrealistic images from René Magritte's paintings. In the morning, the girl, Marie-Ange, has vanished, the villa looks derelict, and his neck is bleeding. Was it all just a nightmare?

When her husband's arrest leaves her penniless, a woman accepts an invitation to move in with a strange couple.

In the 1930s a young fellow, Simon Chalumet, is sent to a military school by his overbearing father, an ex-soldier who has little sympathy for his son's more gentle temperament, or for his interest in films.

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...

Who is Milena whose arrival is announced to Sophie and Nicolas by postcard? The train from Prague brings for three weeks, the time of a visa, this young Czech and his bag stuffed with forbidden texts, marginal films and music. She will strive to make them known with the help of her new friends.

Having both suffered extreme losses, a man and a woman try to form a relationship.

Antoine is now 30, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his his wife. It being the first "no-fault" divorce in France, a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine's past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.

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.

French diplomat Dominique Auphal is put under surveillance by an unnamed secret service. They wish to find a weakness in his life in order to control him politically. Auphal becomes "File no. 51": his private life is spied, analysed and commented.