Esther Gorintin

infuriating, Esther Gorintin became a star at 85, having survived the harrowing 20th century, from her native Poland to the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Between Cannes to the local fast food joint, with a taste for Ted Lapidus designs and a thing about plastic bags, Estherka is the heroine of this comic documentary, the portrait of a woman in the twilight of her life and at the dawn of her career As well as recording the incredible career of this 85 year-old débutant, I wanted to tell the story of her entire life. I had started filming Esther Gorintin before she started acting: her journey through the past century, her memories, her storytelling style, her unique relationship with the world around her, and her very special relationship with her son Armand. Here are the reasons why I followed her for more than ten years.

Alfred lives with his mother in a small village keeping chickens and selling eggs at the local market. He doesn't speak, except to his mother and to children. He has a girlfriend of sorts, although she shies away from any physical contact with her. But more than anything, Alfred wants a child. As natural fatherhood is out of the question he takes the next best option, and makes an application to adopt. With a very un-French lack of bureaucracy Alfred's adoptive son arrives, but turns out not to be the bouncing baby he was hoping for. [taken from London Film Festival 2006 catalogue]

A mysterious old lady dwells in an abandoned apartment block. She lives alone but will simply not leave the place.

사기꾼 에딕은 외국인들을 대상으로 잃어버린 친척을 찾아주는 알선업소를 차린다. 에딕은 이미 지도에서 자취를 감춘 마을과 있지도 않은 가짜 친척들을 만들어 낸 뒤 한탕 하려고 하지만, 일은 뒤죽박죽 꼬이기 시작한다. 시간이 흐르면서 가짜 친척과 의뢰인은 진심으로 혈연의 정을 느끼고, 에딕의 상황은 점점 엉망진창이 되어간다.

The one joy in the lives of a mother and daughter comes from the regular letters sent to them from Paris from the family's adored son, Otar. When the daughter finds out that Otar has died suddenly, she tries to conceal the truth from her mother, changing the course of their lives forever.

After a bull is killed in a bullfight, its body parts are transported across Spain, France, Italy and Belgium. The bull's parts fall into the wide variety of people, including: an Italian actress selling the bones in a supermarket promotion, a Spanish woman who dines on its steaks, a little girl in France who imagines a world where animals are much larger than humans, and a taxidermist whose wife is simultaneously giving birth to quintuplets.

Recently the victim of a car accident, Paul, a teacher, is no longer the same man. He no longer shows any interest in his environment and, even more worryingly, he seems to have become impervious to all feelings, all emotions. His wife, Marianne, and his mistress, Luisa, are of little more interest to him than his students, which is to say very little. Desperate, Luisa meets Marianne to try to understand.

The story is about a woman who is going to Trieste (a city in Italy) to search for informations about a writer who has never written.

In the first of the three linked episodes of French writer-director Emmanuel Finkiel’s delicate, poignant Voyages, a bus tour of Poland, by present-day French survivors of the Holocaust, suffers a mishap: en route to Auschwitz from a Jewish cemetery, the bus breaks down. In the second episode, one of them confronts the possibility that her father, long presumed to be among the Six Million, in fact survived; but is he her father?