Ulrich Picard

Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate is a French documentary film that consists primarily of interviews with Kurosawa’s European collaborators from the time of the making of Ran, with footage from the film interspersed between the talking heads.

With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.

In 1985, Chris Marker traveled to Japan to attend the filming of Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Marker analyzes the progress of filming; the infinite patience of a team under the orders of a meticulous director down to the smallest detail; the antithetical mixture of the modern with the traditional; of the real with the fictitious; of life with cinema… and literature.

After dumping a bucket of water on a beautiful young woman from the window of a train car, wealthy Frenchman Mathieu, regales his fellow passengers with the story of the dysfunctional relationship between himself and the young woman in question, a fiery 19-year-old flamenco dancer named Conchita. What follows is a tale of cruelty, depravity and lies -- the very building blocks of love.

This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

A crook on the run hooks up with a criminal gang to commit a kidnapping. However, things don't go quite as planned.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

The film is a continuation of the story of Tom Sawyer and his friends, the second part of the Romanian screenplay after the famous novel by Mark Twain. The three friends Tom, Huck and Becky continue their adventures full of puzzles and suspense.

The film is a continuation of the story of Tom Sawyer and his friends, the second part of the Romanian screenplay after the famous novel by Mark Twain. The three friends Tom, Huck and Becky continue their adventures full of puzzles and suspense.

An orphaned young woman goes to Paris looking for work and love. Working as an au-pair, she is discovered by a fashion photographer and becomes a model. She falls in love with an architect but leaves him to marry a rich man.

Celestine has a new job as a chambermaid for the quirky M. Monteil, his wife and her father. When the father dies, Celestine decides to quit her job and leave, but when a young girl is raped and murdered, Celestine believes that the Monteils' groundskeeper, Joseph, is guilty, and stays on in order to prove it. She uses her sexuality and the promise of marriage to get Joseph to confess -- but things do not go as planned.

Following the defeat of France by Germany during WWII, two french soldiers are taken to a german farm as forced laborers.

On Christmas Eve, Françoise, a manicurist at the Paris-Palace-Hotel, is invited to celebrate by Henri Delormel, an attractive fifty-something man. She later meets Gérard driving a Cadillac, and passes herself off as the wealthy Delormel's daughter. For his part, the young garage employee claims to own the vehicle.

Lola Montes, previously a great adventuress, is reduced to being the attraction of a circus after having been the lover of various important men.

In this romance, a jilted lawyer joins the French Foreign Legion to help him forget his faithless love. While in the desert he espies a village beauty who is the exact double of his true-love.

Ex-convict Georges Manda returns to the free world determined to go straight and takes a steady job as a carpenter. Unable to completely shake his connections with the underground, he meets with a former prison mate, older gangster Félix Leca, who introduces him to his mistress, the sweet but guarded Marie "Casque d'Or". Marie and Georges fall into a passionate relationship, driving Félix to do everything in his power to ruin the couple.