Georges Strouvé

Agnès Varda's documentary portrait of her late husband, Jacques Demy. A companion piece to her Jacquot de Nantes.

A reluctant boxer is the focus of this unique French romance. Maurice dreams of becoming a violinist. But his father, a former boxing champion crippled by his bouts, has other dreams for his pudgy but strong 18 year old son. He wants Maurice to become the next Champ. Concerned about his son's lack of machismo, the father arranges a tryst between Maurice and Nora, an aging femme fatale. Unfortunately Nora's jealous husband suddenly interrupts their romantic interlude. Maurice accidently kills the husband in the ensuing scuffle. United by the tragedy, Nora and Maurice eventually fall in love. Maurice is then inspired to become a great fighter.

Sébastien Fischer, a celebrated pianist, takes the advice of his agent and friend Gorgio and decides to take a break and spend some time in a little village in Provence, at the house of Avril Espart.

One of the last productions for Diagonale, before De sueur et de sang, the feature film with which Vecchiali would close the cycle of the French production company.

Jacquot Demy, the son of a garage owner and a hairdresser, is fascinated by cinema and decides to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker by any means necessary.

The oddest things come in pairs. In 1989, there were two foreign films on the market whose titles translated to Errors of Youth or Youthful Indiscretion. One was a Russian film, the other was a French picture, originally titled Erreur de Jeunesse. In this one, would-be poet Francis Frappat breezes through a number of relationships. Of paramount importance to Frappat are his attempts to seduce the lovely Géraldine Danon.

A night of drinking in a local cafe quickly turns to tragedy for two of its patrons.

Louis is a family man, with a wife and young daughter, who discovers in mid-life that he is gay.

A radiant young sex worker thrives amidst the clients of Paris’s Les Halles under the protectiveness of her pimp. Her carefully balanced existence unravels when she meets a working‑class man and falls in love, forcing her to confront the emotional and social consequences of pursuing a different path.

On Paul's initiative, Françoise and Paul met after a long separation, on the pretext to search in commun for a lost memory, a song. It soons appears that Paul's objective is to win her back.

A woman returns after twenty years to Toulon where her husband, who collaborated with the nazis, was murdered. Her motives are unclear.

Marcel is his garage's handyman. With the smell of grease and petrol wafting through the air, alternating between night watchman, petrol pump attendant and confidant, he is visited every evening by the slightly lost night owls who pass by. They all confide in him about their daily troubles.

The tribulations of a bisexual who's a bit of an exhibitionist.

Claire, a young woman visits an old friend to relieve her heartache.

Ginette is at phone with the famous Rachah Rangers, who hosts a daily radio program. She talks about her break with Richard, her various relationship problems, her desires, fears and reproaches. Her friend, Simone Barbes, advised her to live, urgently, a new relationship ...

Pierrot, mechanic in Paris, falls madly for a female chemist his senior—who at first refuses him, only accepting love after being diagnosed with a deadly illness.

Camille, a young, provincial, proletarian man works for Hélène Courtray, who is still beautiful and seductive. She's a sophisticated, cultivated and well-to-do woman who has engaged him to care for her reclusive son who has spent the past few years voluntarily locked up in his room. An encounter between two persons and two worlds where the relationship of the young man to this closed, strange and unknown universe rapidly turns tragedy.

The fortunes of a small theatrical company based in the Paris suburbs.

Pierre Lentier murders an 8-year-old in horrendous circumstances. This 30-something solitary factory worker who lives on the edge of society is sentenced to death. A damning indictment of the death penalty and the manipulative behaviour of the media.

The fantasies and dreams of two over-the-hill actresses are intertwined with their realities, as the two roommates struggle to survive their day-to-day lives in the expensive and difficult world of Paris.

A young couple discover an ancient book in the attic and start reading the story of the Malemort family: a sombre household set in the nineteenth century in rural France. The old man Deroze plays his violin and tries to seduce the maid. His elder daughter Maxime "qui tue les mouches et deguste en cachette des fruits juteux". Underneath her bourgeois facade her senses are not yet put to rest. There is the rest of this upstairs/downstairs family who is visited by a sea captain who learns of a hidden treasure The storyline of this adult fairy tale is less important than the cinematography and the lyric fairy tale atmosphere that surrounds this movie. A little masterpiece still to be rediscovered.

Erotic comedy about an incorrigible womanizer whose lecherous love life becomes too much to handle. Things culminate when his jealous friends arrange for his fiancee and his mistresses to meet him at the same time.

Julien, the son of a minister has just married Birgitt, a Swede she met during her holidays on the French Riviera. She was recovering, having come to rest with Julien's father, a friend of her family. During the wedding cocktail, Julien remembers these holidays.

In this French-language film, Albin is a mercenary soldier. Sure, he's paid to kill, but he only agrees to jobs where he's killing those who need to be killed. Anyway, he trusts his buddies, and they trust him: in this case with a big haul of money they found in a jungle shoot-out. When he returns to France one of the first things he does, quite by chance, is to go see the act of Le Grande Magic Circus. The circus keeps coming into his life for the rest of the movie, as he tries to live a "regular" life.

Old Léon lives an hour outside Paris, in the company of one of his daughters, his son-in-law and his granddaughter. The latter agrees to take him to see his paralyzed cousin Adolphe in a Paris hospice. He takes the opportunity to visit his first wife, trying to get news of his daughter Louise, who is dead but whom he prefers to believe is alive. What remains is the haunting memory of the daffodils he planted for her...

Émile targets women he believes are too depressed to go on living. As multiple victims fall to his suffocating white scarf, an inspector resorts to unorthodox methods to get him with the assistance of a potential victim.

20 years later, the recreation of the trial of a simple man that confesses himself as a war criminal, Carl Emmanuel Jung.

In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaíso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town.

François Truffaut said of Paul Vecchiali in his early days that he was "the only true heir of Jean Renoir." The first short film of this director, who was to become a singular figure of independent French cinema, follows the path of an elderly woman towards her memories and beyond. Attentive, affectionate and sometimes cruel, Vecchiali's camera invents its own expressive language.

Les Etoiles de Midi is an engaging docudrama about some of the more spectacular exploits of French mountain climbers over the last several decades. In one re-enacted story, there is a wartime escape through the mountains, and in another, a daring rescue of a pair of climbers who had been missing. The actors themselves are adept at the sport of climbing, and they give the scenes an immediacy and real daring that brings the stories alive. A combination of their acrobatics and skill and the outstanding episodes in the history of French climbing creates a winning 78 minutes.