Director
Turkey, a village, today. A French filmmaker of Armenian origin returns to his roots. Four times in three decades, the director and actor Serge Avédikian returned to Sölöz, his grandparents' village located 170 km south of Istanbul. Throughout his successive returns from 1987 to 2019, he has drawn from this experience a powerful film on the themes of identity, historical truth and reconciliation.
Jon (voice)
In a small town plunged into darkness, two children, Kyona and Adriel, are separated from their parents and, facing the path of exile alone, embark on a heroic journey that will take them from childhood to adolescence, in search of refuge, peace and the hope of finding their family.
Writer
Director
Armenak
Aram, a young man from Marseille of Armenian origin, blows up the Turkish ambassador's car in Paris. Gilles, a young cyclist who was passing at that precise moment, is seriously injured. Aram's mother feels guilty and feels the need to visit Gilles at the hospital and beg for his forgiveness, something that Gilles does not understand. Against the advice of his comrades in Beirut, Aram decides to go meet his victim.
Danou
Jeanne Dorwa, 57, faces early retirement when she falls head-over-heels in love with 35-year-old Pascal, throwing her life and everyone around her into turmoil.
Santi
In Brittany, a notary is killed with shots to the head. His wife Joséphine is a suspect. Her husband had just sold part of their property to two shady real estate developers who wanted to transform the little fishing village into an ultra-modern marina for wealthy clients.
Paradjanov
Film director Sergey Paradjanov creates brilliant films. His nonconformist behavior conflicts with Soviet System. He is committed to prison for being eccentric. His indestructible love for beauty allows him to withstand the years of imprisonment, isolation and oblivion.
Director
Film director Sergey Paradjanov creates brilliant films. His nonconformist behavior conflicts with Soviet System. He is committed to prison for being eccentric. His indestructible love for beauty allows him to withstand the years of imprisonment, isolation and oblivion.
Le père d'Irâne
Nasser-Ali, a talented musician, loses the will to live after his wife breaks his beloved violin during an argument. He searches for a replacement, and finding none that sounds quite the same, he vows to die. Eight days later, he does. This is the story of his last week of life, where we see flashbacks and flash forwards of his previous life and his children's futures. We also see appearances of a nude Sophia Loren as well as the angel of death, Azarel. As we see his life, we realize exactly why he chose to end it and the profundity of this choice.
For seventeen year old Avaz, family is like a sentence. His mom is the subject, his father the verb, and he is the complement. He shows us his family's life through this prism until his father leaves for the hospital.
Director
Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, 1910. There are too many stray dogs on the streets, so the government decides to deport thousands of them on a desert island, off the coast of the city.
Shanghai in the 30s: money rules in this city open to all adventures and whose reputation attracts all the bold adventurers of the world. Albert Londres, one of the most famous journalists of the time, who is in Shanghai in 1924 reports to his newspaper. In 1932, the city is plunged into an armed conflict triggered by Japan, served as a curtain raiser for a new dispensation. Following the lashing rise of Du Yuesheng in Shanghai, the godfather of the Green Gang, we embark on an exploration of the period when bankers and drug traffickers, revolutionaries and nationalists made history. Unpublished Chinese archive materials, private archives, old feature films, period newspapers, police reports, diplomatic correspondence, journalism by Albert Londres and explorations of present-day Shanghai, sketch the portrait of a world that continues to fascinate the West.
Micha Aznavourian
This gripping historical drama recounts the story of Armenian-born Missak Manouchian, a woodworker and political activist who led an immigrant laborer division of the Parisian Resistance on 30 operations against the Nazis in 1943. The Nazis branded the group an Army of Crime, an anti-immigrant propaganda stunt that backfired as the team's members became martyrs for the Resistance.
Narrator (Voice)
"The Armenian film Bonded Parallels tells two intersecting stories: a mother who gives life to a child at the cost of her own and a daughter who repeats a similar love story that once resulted in her own birth. The two ‘bonded parallel’ stories provide a close look at two different societies in entirely different time frames, and in doing that they bring unexpected similarities to the surface. On one side, there is the story of Hanna, who lives in a small village in Norway during World War II, waiting for her husband. Meanwhile, she meets Arakel, a Russian prisoner of war of Armenian origin and gives him asylum, an event that inevitably leads to a love affair. As for daughter Laura, love comes from a disobeying student. Her story takes place during the 1980s, when the demonstrations of Armenians for independence reached their climax." - IFFR
Director
Documentary on the Armenian genocide
Jean-Pierre Durieux
A hard-hitting French drama detailing the intersecting destinies of five characters whose lives cross over the current war in Iraq: three young French Arabs who each for a different reason joins a jihadi group to fight against the Americans; a 40-something French woman running an NGO in Baghdad at the outbreak of the war who gets kidnapped and held by the jihadi insurgents; and a mid-level French diplomat who uncovers the corruption of the UN Oil for Food program while gathering evidence to support the French effort to prevent the war.
Vanig
This is a story about returning to ones ancestral homeland. Anna is a cardiologist who discovers her father has fled to his native Armenia after being diagnosed with a heart problem. Despite their contentious relationship, she sets out to bring her father back for this operation. Anna is a tough-minded, headstrong woman with little feeling for her fathers homeland or patience with its politics and socially intrusive culture, yet she finds this journey not only a reunion of sorts, but one of reconciliation as well.
Monsieur Fares
This movie portrays three women living in today's Algeria between modern society and Islamic fundamentalism, self-determination and dependence. Goucem, a young woman who works for a photographer and mistress of a rich doctor, her mother Papicha, a former cabaret star, and her best friend Fifi, a prostitute, all live in a hotel in the city center of Algiers. Their difficult personal situation and the growing influence of Islam lead to dramatic consequences...
Igor Lipovsky
From his offices in Switzerland, Russian Igor Lipovsky is engaged in a vast and profitable gunrunning operation with Africa. The French government wants to hinder the activities of the arms dealer and sends a team to sink one of his ships heading for Angola with a load of illegal weaponry. Lisa, Brisseau, Loïc, Tony and Raymond are professionals: they carefully set up their cover, plan all their moves meticulously, and carry out orders without asking questions. Perhaps they should. The code-name of the mission is "Janus"; and just like with the ancient deity, there are two opposite faces for every aspect of the operation: the objective of the French government, the role of each team member, the presumed friend and the assumed foe...
In 1630, a plague epidemic ravages the city of Milan. In a climate of suspicion and terror, two men are accused of spreading the disease in the city. Interrogated and tortured, they are forced to expose the story of an imaginary crime. Then, before dying, they invent the story of the Sowers of Plague.
As Gerard is shooting a documentary in Marrakesh, he turns his camera toward a young Moroccan boy: Saïd. A love story starts and it will bring Gerard all over Morocco. Through encounters, love adventures, youth's memories, Gerard tries to define his destiny so tied to Morocco.
Director
Writer
(Voice)
Talaat
Aram, an ex-soldier from the Armenian cause, has come to France to close an arms deal under secret service surveillance. Held responsible and banished by his faher for his brother's injuries in a terrorist ttack, he's also come to seek revenge for the drama that has marked his family and his life.
Two women, angry Myope and happy Lunette (both played by Franssou Prenant), bounce ideas off each other in a small apartment, until Lunette fashions a story about Agathe (Cecile Garcia Fogel) and her husband Pierrot (Manuel Cedron), a one-time musician who now teaches gym. While the two love each other, they cannot communicate without quarreling.
Kurdish expert Hiner Saleem (Shero) wrote and directed this French comedy-drama, set inside the 100,000-population Kurdish community in Paris. The original French title translates as "Long Live the Bride...and the Liberation of Kurdistan." Cheto (Georges Corraface) seeks a wife via videotapes while still seeing his French girlfriend, immigration office worker Christine (Stephanie Lagarde). Cheto places an order for a beautiful girl, but he's disappointed when her sister, country girl Mina (Marina Kobakhidze), arrives at the airport as a substitute. Family pressure forces him to marry her. Unhappy with the way she's treated by Cheto, Mina acquires some progressive notions from Leila (Schahla Aalam) and other local feminists, leading to confrontations with Cheto.
Calvino, the father
Judge Larcher, who has lost his wife and child, leads a quiet and secluded life in retirement; until the day his path crosses that of Clara, a troubled teenager; it doesn't take long for the perceptive Larcher to detect a dark story of incest between the young girl, who has lost her mother, and her father, a bitter widower...
A child is confronted with the (ever young) old age of the world, its hazards, its cinema and music, shot in seven days in Rome, Fiumicino, Ciampino and Cineccità. What will happen on July 12, 1995, in Rome ? What will become of July 12, 1995, in Rome ?
The hero of the film unexpectedly discovers the ability to be in several places at the same time.
This film bears witness to a life that changes... Or how Aurore, a young woman of 26 who is bored in Nohant, with Baron Dudevant, her country husband with the appearance of a gentleman, becomes George Sand.
Director
Not a sound, only landscapes, raw sounds... Some births and deaths of bees... Traveling from one to another space, a man looks at them, dreams of them... Sometimes, he remembers his joyful youth. At the end of his travel, he arrives in a colourful market place, but he is alone, isolated in the middle of the organized and cruel society, like the bees.
André
A young woman in a lesbian relationship keeps a diary that is stolen by a young man who loves her.
Vaksen Papasian
Henri Verneuil was born Achod Malakian of Armenian parentage on October 15, 1920, in Rodosto, Turkey, and his family fled to France and settled in Marseilles when he was a young child. He later recounted his childhood experience in the novel Mayrig, which he dedicated to his mother and made into this 1991 film with the same name.
Le docteur Turc
The world after the atomic age. An engineer disappears, together with his consortium (Kryo'Corp) and his discovery: a new energy source powered by the fusion of two primary substances. Ulysses, Kryo'Corp's heir, organises an expedition to the only place these substances occur.
A team of amateur filmmakers sets off, camera in hand, to the south of Morocco. During their stay, one of the members of the group, Fanette, a vulgar vampire, is murdered. The Moroccan police do not find the culprit, and Paris takes over the case. The inspector in charge of the investigation decides to view all the "works" made on site, in the presence of their author.
Yoav
In a drama in which even God has a role (Philippe Leotard) as well as Michael York, it is certain that serious issues are at stake. Set during the time before the state of Israel was created and established, a British officer has been captured by a band of Jewish resistance fighters with the intent of killing him at dawn. One of the Jews was sentenced to die after being captured by the English, and this death will be in retaliation. The trouble is that a young and ambivalent fighter is left holding the officer captive with orders to shoot him at the pre-arranged time. It is a long night of soul-searching before the Jewish soldier comes up with a solution to his quandary.
Fadenko
World Chess Champion Akiva Liebskind (Michel Piccoli) faces his former pupil Pavius Fromm (Alexandre Arbatt), who defected to the West from the Soviet Union five years earlier, for the World Chess Championship in Geneva, Switzerland. The tension and strategies between the players draw parallels to the political conflicts and ideologies between East and West during the Cold War.
Guy Merlin
A reporter enters the world of bodybuilding at a time when there has just been a death at the gym. He befriends an unusually gregarious bodybuilder there.
Director
"No Return Possible": these three words cross the identity papers of the Armenians who left Turkey after the massacres of 1915.
Guy Rouveron
During the final days of World War II, a simple French peasant rescues a wounded German soldier and nurses him back to health. As their playful camaraderie grows, two young men who should be enemies begin to bond in ways neither thought possible.
Christian Ranucci
A film version of author Gilles Perrault's best-selling book about the 1976 trial and execution of Christian Ranucci, the youth who was convicted with extremely inconclusive evidence of murdering an eight-year-old girl in Southern France. The publicity the book and film helped abolish capital punishment in France in 1981.