Dominique Auvray

Wang Bing is one of the greatest documentary-makers alive today, and his films offer a very insightful overview of the transformations occurring in Chinese society. Here, Dominique Auvray conducts an interview that, in addition to the biographical information, focuses above all on the relationship with things unsaid: Wang Bing attempts to do justice to his theme and the testimonies he’s gathered, but he stumbles over the words, struggling to keep his emotions in check. The pain of tackling history shows through the awkward speech.

In a quiet village in southern China, Fang Xiuying is sixty-seven years old. Having suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, with advanced symptoms and ineffective treatment, she was sent back home. Now, bedridden, she is surrounded by her relatives and neighbors, as they witness and accompany her through her last days.

Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

Documentary on famous writer Marguerite Duras and her paradoxical relation to the seventh art by her former film editor.

Paolo wants to go to Itlay, to forget his broken heart. Arthur suggests a surprising shortcut: Do all roads lead to Rome?

A night in the lives of an all-girl punk band as they illicitly shoot their first music video on the streets of Tangier.

Nana is 4 years old and lives in a stone house beyond the forest. Back from school, a late afternoon, all she finds is silence in the house. A journey into the darkness of her childhood. The world from her height.

A girl on the verge of maturity tells her family and friends in the French countryside so many lies about her hidden relationships that they can hardly be called 'white lies' anymore. It gradually becomes clear what secret she's bearing with her.

Serguei is a 50 year old railway worker, seemingly cheerful and sociable. But within the intimacy of his gloomy apartment, he lives a terrible loneliness that he tries to make up for by watching funny shows on television. When it breaks down, he tries to repair it and overhears a couple’s argument in the apartment next door. Driven by a growing fascination for the woman’s voice, he starts to vicariously share her everyday life, till the day he walks through her door…

A young woman leaves her job and lover in Japan to start a new life in Thailand.

A French couple has been living in Lisbon for years, and they return to Paris for a friend's wedding. They announce to another friend they are having dinner with that they are going to split.

On June 3, 1991, Marguerite Duras gave me her last published work, "The North China Lover", autographed for the first time. She wrote: "For my friend Dominique Auvray, in memory of a wonder of wonders: a still recent past, when we worked together in the cinema". This is a portrait of her as she was cheerful and serious, authentic and provocative, considerate and categorical, but first and foremost young and free.

On June 3, 1991, Marguerite Duras gave me her last published work, "The North China Lover", autographed for the first time. She wrote: "For my friend Dominique Auvray, in memory of a wonder of wonders: a still recent past, when we worked together in the cinema". This is a portrait of her as she was cheerful and serious, authentic and provocative, considerate and categorical, but first and foremost young and free.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

The original television version of 'Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?'

Six unused scenes from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? One of the more priceless of the “bagatelles” in this collection features a lounging Jean-Marie Straub who gives a non-stop disquisition on liberty and filmmaking while Danièle Huillet busies herself with laundry, and their dog Melchior frisks in and out of frame. —Cinematheque Ontario

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

Marguerite has been married to Paul for five years; miraculously the molecules in their pairing are still at work. Except for one thing: they live in Montreal, and molecules do not like the cold.

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama.

Two young girls of the war generation, Yasmin and Leila, are in search of Beirut. When they meet an elderly film enthusiast with a secret store of Lebanese films, they persuade him to screen his collection for them. So begins an initiation into the myths and images of Beirut, but the girls want cold figures and facts, war babies indifferent to the memories evoked.

In the sixties, in a suburb near Paris, Martine wants to lose her virginity.

Probably no one in the public listening to the orchestra's rendition of Ravel's Bolero notices him but the drummer is a regular hero. For, although his mind is assailed by loads of unsettling thoughts and worries, he tries to keep the rhythm at any cost. He knows all too well that he falls out of time only once all the magic of the piece will vanish.

Sophie comes to New York from France with the intention of joining a man she met a few months before. She finds herself alone in the apartment of the guy, who left town because he was scared stiff at the idea of seeing her. Originally commissioned as one third of an omnibus feature showcasing the Figaro, a Japan-only retro throwback car.

A worldly French teen is determined to escape from her current situation for a better life.

Dah and Jocelyn come from Benin, Africa, to coach their rooster, "S'en fout la mort", for an illicit cock-fight in the basement of a restaurant.

This film of interviews with the film director Jacques Rivette was produced in collaboration with Serge Daney, film critic from “Cahiers du cinéma”, then of “Liberation”. In the course of their conversations, the two speakers discuss Rivette’s career, his relationships with the other film makers of the new wave, his use of “mise en scene” and his working with actors.

Wim Wenders talks with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto about the creative process and ponders the relationship between cities, identity and the cinema in the digital age.

The film takes the form of a documentary report in which the director Claire Denis follows Les Têtes Brulées, a group of five musicians from Yaoundé in Cameroon, as they tour France.

This symbolic drama from director Benoit Jacques underscores the characters' human need for affection. Children steal lemons for the thrill, while women steal other women's men from them just to prove they can. Drug smuggling, clandestine love affairs, and two lovers involved with the production of Shakespeare's Othello carry on with their own off-stage tragedy.

A man caught in the midst of the events of Algeria is experiencing a new but fleeting happiness with a young Algerian.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Juliette is a young woman who has grown up on a farm that is now under economic siege. In order to save her farm and her family, Juliette is forced into a marriage of convenience with Marcel , a morose and laconic railway worker whom she does not even know. Now that her own life is permanently changed, her sacrifice does not ultimately help her family and with that sorrow added to her lonely existence, she is trapped into remaining married because of social pressures and soon enough, the birth of a child. There must surely be a way out for her at some point, but when and how that will happen seems completely up to fate alone.

Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other. These people, shipwrecked lovers, are dying to love, to escape the abyss of solitude.

A documentary that follows Dr. Penny Patterson's current scientific study of Koko, a gorilla who communicates through American Sign Language.

In an empty villa, Vera Baxter sits and contemplates her life, as she recounts to a woman who was drawn to the villa when she heard the name Vera Baxter pronounced. Vera tells her about her no-good husband, who has been using her to keep his failing business afloat, up to her present love affair.

In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the characters or their motivations, and sometimes the actor does. That's all -- there is no action, there are no location shots, no one pretends to be anything else. The script itself tells about an encounter between a blank-slate of a woman hitchhiker, and a communist truck driver. As the reading progresses, Duras comments bitterly about the failed ideals of communism and the glorious revolution that will probably never happen.

Filmmaker Barbet Schroeder shows the Ugandan dictator meeting his Cabinet, reviewing his troops, explaining his ideology.