Alex Descas

Alma Lancaster, 18, appears to lead a perfect life within a wealthy family who believes she is studying law. In secret, she pursues her true dream: filmmaking. On campus, she meets Vadim Arcadi, 20, a magnetic and solitary rebel with a troubled past. Forced to collaborate on a student film, they clash, grow closer and fall in love — despite themselves. But someone is watching them, determined to tear them apart and expose secrets that could destroy both Alma and Vadim.

Father Cyril Nouvel has mysteriously disappeared. Yet it is at his initiative that his brother, Gendarme Louis Nouvel, and his mentor, Abbé Gomis, find themselves gathered at the site of an abandoned old fort. As they set out to search for him in this vast and oppressive place, tension rises between the two men. Even if they cannot admit it to themselves, each knows deep down that he holds a part of the truth.

A head nurse defies hospital rules to let a mother stay with her malnourished son. As they navigate a complex crisis, the nurse's empathy proves just as vital to the boy's healing as medicine.

In the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya drought is a menace to both humans and animals. This documentary follows two Elephant Guardians in their tireless work to protect this endangered species.

Forest dwellers pound drums upholding rituals while urbanites cry "Progress!" More plunder the land's riches but newly defiant ones shout back.

Frantz Fanon alone embodies all the issues of French colonial history. Martinican resistance fighter, he enlisted, like millions of colonial soldiers, in the Free Army out of loyalty to France and the idea of freedom that it embodies for him. A writer, he participated in the bubbling life of Saint-Germain with Césaire, Senghor and Sartre, debating tirelessly on the destiny of colonized peoples. As a doctor, he revolutionized the practice of psychiatry, seeking in the relations of domination of colonial societies the foundations of the pathologies of his patients in Blida. Activist, he brings together through his action and his history of him, the anger of peoples crushed by centuries of colonial oppression. But beyond this exceptional journey which makes sensitive the permanence of French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles at the gates of the Algerian desert, he leaves an incomparable body of work which has made him today one of the most studied French authors across the Atlantic.

After long years spent in exile in Paris, Lyubov, a strange and elusive woman, returns to her ancestral estate, about to be sold to pay off the family’s debts. As the centre around which the play revolves, forever oscillating between tragedy and comedy, this maternal figure, this mater dolorosa, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to a family unsettled by the future of the estate, and more largely, by that of this world she left behind. Modern society, with its social changes, is right around the corner, noisily announcing its arrival.

After scuttling her career as a singer, Jewell Stone lives in Paris a job as a waitress. Marie, her grandmother and only family, who lives in Vermont, USA, arrives overnight to see her. But how to welcome her when Jewell tells her so long about her life, her work and her loves? From one letter to another, she has invented a career that works, a life with Paul, and even a girl, Ruby. But as an Italian proverb says, lies have short legs.

After 30-year-old French war reporter Gabriel Dahan is taken hostage in Syria, he heads to India following months in captivity.

The story revolves around 22-year-old Laure, who is trying to find her feet. After performing brilliantly in her literature studies, she enrols as a communications officer in the Naval Fusiliers. She will quickly have to adapt to and assimilate the rules that apply within the institution. But Laure is a determined woman, and she has a thirst for knowledge – still. A thirst to learn to get to know and be comfortable with herself, and to find her place.

Isabelle, Parisian artist, divorced mother, is looking for love, true love, at last.

Thomas, an architect, discovers that he made a serious mistake on a building site. As he attempts to destroy compromising documents, it is the world around him that mysteriously begins to disappear. No one seems to escape this fantastic gear, not even Thomas.

Having arrived in Paris in 1985, Hector did everything to be like “them”. In a notebook he finds in his flat, he crosses out a list of things he should do or pay attention to if he wants to become part of the French elite. In a painful dialogue with Martin, his alleged son, Hector notices himself in Martin; a young man full of dreams and ideals that turn out not to be matched by reality. Metropole is a film about migration, about assimilation, about the haunting of one’s past. It is a film about identity; lost, assumed, false. Metropole tells the story of millions of people out there who leave their homes behind in order to find a new one.

Chocolat the clown, the first black stage performer in France, goes from anonymity to fame after forming an unprecedented duo with fellow performer Footit in the very popular in Belle Epoque Paris. But easy money, gambling, and discrimination take their toll on their friendship and Chocolat's career.

A companion to the director's Le Dos Rouge/Portrait of the Artist. A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters.

A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters. But what he doesn't show to anyone, not even his wife, is the mark on his back that keeps getting bigger. This red mark worries him, upsets him, and seems to want to tell him something...

In Madeleine Among the Dead, Bonello wanted to tell Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the perspective of Madeleine (played by Kim Novak), not Scottie (James Stewart). He only filmed a scene of this project as part of another film by Antoine Barraud, Le Dos Rouge, in which Bonello plays the role of a director by the same name; a director whose films are all either invented or his “ghost-movies.”

With two actors and no sets, master filmmaker Claire Denis traces the arc of a strained relationship, with a focus on race and language. In this fraught arena, words omitted can be as potentially devastating as words used, and what is not seen can have greater political consequences than what is.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, a middle-aged Port-au-Prince couple come face to face with the stark contradictions of Haitian society when they are forced to rent out their villa to a foreign aid worker and his enterprising local girlfriend.

Rebecca is a cop in the Juvenile Division. One day, Mathieu Francoeur comes to the station, saying his son, Joachim, has been kidnapped by his mother Christelle, with whom he's separated. However Rebecca had seven years earlier witnessed the man being extremely abusive to his ex-wife and child...

Marco returns to Paris after his brother-in-law's suicide, where he targets the man his sister believes caused the tragedy – though he is ill-prepared for her secrets as they quickly muddy the waters.

A rich industrialist is brutally kidnapped. While he physically and mentally degenerates in imprisonment, the kidnappers, police and the board of the company of which he is director negotiate about the ransom of 50 million euro.

A solitary man and his partner share a tense love/hate relationship. Their lives are disrupted when a stranger enters, gradually insinuating himself into their world. The stranger’s persistence creates strain, leaving the man with lingering questions about his motivations and the impact on his life.

A mysterious stranger works outside the law and keeps his objectives hidden, trusting no one. While his demeanor is paradoxically focused and dreamlike all at once, he embarks on a journey that not only takes him across Spain, but also through his own consciousness.

A widower and his daughter witness the retirement of a colleague of his and the closing of her department at her university.

Carl is about to spend his first day with the police. To facilitate his entry into the trade, the divisional commissioner assigned him with Alain, a man with a strong character.

Following their mother's suicide, three children are the subject of a dispute between their gay half-brother and his infertile sister, who are fighting for custody.

A beautiful woman, Sandra, seduces a wealthy businessman, Miles Rennburg. Little does he realise that she has been sent to kill him at the behest of her boyfriend/crime partner, Lester. Controlling all this is Sue, Lester's wife.

"Tag!" - About the American malaria researcher Nkruma who arrives with a family to Gothenburg for a lecture at Sahlgrenska Hospital. Nkruma ends up in a strange prank. The adults play tag in the streets. Nkruma refuses to participate in the game. This will be fatal for him and his family.

In 1988, after much cunning political maneuvering, Loïk Le Floch-Prigent and Alfred Sirven become the chief executives at Elf. They discover a company that runs on kickbacks: in exchange for the oil rights, Elf makes handsome but discreet payoffs to the leaders of African nations. With the tacit complicity of President Mitterrand, and with eventual political and personal interests in mind, the new management takes charge of the slush fund. Within months, Sirven, Le Floch-Prigent and his wife Fatima Belaïd fill their pockets with more than they could ever have imagined.

In 1988, supported by François Mitterrand, Loïk Le Floch-Prigent ran for the presidency of Elf. Alfred Sirven, through Christine Deviers-Joncour, introduced him to Roland Dumas. A year later, Le Floch-Prigent was appointed CEO of Elf Aquitaine. Sirven becomes Director of General Affairs at Elf...

Shipwrecked by a storm on Slave Island, the survivors are forced, according to the law of this Republic, to exchange their status: from master, Iphicrates becomes the slave of his slave Arlequin, and Euphrosin, from mistress, becomes the slave of her slave Cléanthis. But this exchange merely replaces oppression based on custom and tradition with oppression based on resentment and revenge. Only a transformation of hearts can make inequality of rank acceptable and just by making everyone recognize the equality of souls. This transformation is the work of Arlequin, who forgives his master, returns his power to him, and whose generosity is contagious.

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.

An emotionally cold man leaves the safety of his Alpine home to seek a heart transplant and an estranged son.

Ninth is a promising young rapper whose reputation does not exceed even the few streets of his neighborhood. With his band and supported by Keuj, hairdresser apprentice producer, he tries to attend concerts and trying to break into the music, to the chagrin of his mother, who would see him in a more conventional career at the post office...

Albert Renaud, a young French Canadian dreams of becoming a movie star and take the train to Hollywood. His trip is filled with adventures.

Two childhood friends, Joshua and Flint, are adrift in boredom in their area of Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe. They're involved in petty theft and ordinary System D, until the arrival of Marcus. Caught in a spiral, the difficult choices has to be done...

At the end of 19th century, Doctor Pierre Adélaïde, born in Martinique, gets to a small village in Charente to take over from a colleague. Soon, he is facing something else than racism: fear of foreigner. His office is desperately empty.

Portrait of Nord-Plage, a small neighborhood in the north of Martinique, which is slowly dying, and its last inhabitants, who have put aside their hopes and dreams.

An anthology of eleven vignettes featuring star-studded casts of extremely unique individuals who all share the common activities of conversing while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

It is the story of a prohibited and perverted identification: how an eight-year-old boy, entrusted to the care of his mother since the separation of the parents, meets and looks at his father, all day long.

Based on the legend of Tiresias, it tells of a transgender woman who is kidnapped by a man and left to die in the woods. She is then saved by a family and receives the gift of telling the future.

Alphonse Brown, who firmly believes he is the bastard son of James Brown, meets up with his best friend Scotch after Brown gets out of jail. On their way to Paris to begin careers as recording artists, the pair stumbles across a potent type of marijuana that was engineered by the Nazis. Their decision to begin selling the stuff leads to a variety of people chasing after them.

Collection of short films the summaries of which include; a foreign man moving to Italy, getting married and having a child; a four split scene short involving plot-less images of old people with television sets for heads, a beautiful woman having sex, and overall confusion; and an old man reminiscing over his youth.

A train conversation between an immigrant French woman and novelist Jean-Luc Nancy centering on the idea of intrusion within every foreigner (a more philosophical precursor to L'Intrus). A social commentary on the inherent fallacy - particularly in nations with a strong national identity like the U.S. and France - of the social notion that assimilation and integration embrace cultural differences; rather, it erases them.

This program of short films by Vincent Ravalec (Never twice, Le Masseur and Les Mots de l'amour) deals with themes such as desire and death through the journey of a group of characters.

Newlyweds Shane and June arrive in Paris for their honeymoon. In the process of trying to find a cure for his strange, bloodthirsty disease, Shane stumbles upon the story of a doctor and his flesh eating wife.

The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgian overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.

On the eve of the fall of the Ottoman Empire: in the harem of Sultan Abdulhamit II, the odalisque of Italian origin Safiyè dreams of becoming the sultan's first mistress. To achieve her goal, the girl, aided by the eunuch Nadir, is even willing to kill. But when her dream is finally about to come true, her entire world suddenly collapses: the sultan is exiled, the harem is closed, and the odalisques and eunuchs are abandoned to their fate.

A book editor juggles relationships with two women while coping with his best friend's terminal illness.

Yves Le Guen, a black man with a degree in economics, is hired as a handyman on the property of Mr. Moreau, a rich public works contractor. His arrival is going to upset the daily life of the inhabitants of the house.

A film about the creation of director Šarūnas Bartas's feature film and the mysterious atmosphere of the filming location.

A moving world of spirits and ghosts, condemned to brush against one another without really meeting since they have all emerged from a single perpetual dream: that of a young man who no longer wants to wake up, immersed as he is in this world of fascinating spectres.

Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents' divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There's a problem that they must confront.

In the nightclub where she works, Carole is dreaming. She has always dreamed of leaving her rainy Roubaix, her heavy guys and her lousy prospects. She is dreaming of Goa, India, where she thinks she will soon move with her friend Nora... She is dreaming about this, when Nora wakes her up with a catastrophic face... Nora, her best friend, who also works at the Emergency, and not at the night emergency room as her parents believe... Nora is sure she is pregnant. From Olivier, a rich son of a local family who had promised her marriage and a mansion.... In fact of promises, he is quick to back out, and only Carole's presence of mind allows them to get money from him, price of his cowardice. A little money moreover, that brings closer to Goa...

A series of six dramatic shorts, each from a different African country and all on the broad theme of "love in Africa."

Based on a play by Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed, SO BE IT offers an emotionally searing allegory of present-day Africa's bloody internecine convulsions.

A has-been French filmmaker wants a Hong Kong actress to be the heroine in a rendering of Les Vampires.

A young woman visiting Paris misses the last bus home and finds herself stranded on the outskirts of Paris. Entering a local club, she meets a troubled drug addict.

A young investigative journalist is about to publish a book with revelations about power and corruption. Three days before her television appearance, her apartment is devastated by an explosion. Forced into exile, she goes to the countryside where she meets a particularly endearing person.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the mission doctor, theologian and philosopher who founded a hospital in the rainforests of Gabon, achieved sainthood in his lifetime, at least in the popular imagination. The critical assessment of his life and works in recent years, however, has been slightly more ambivalent. Ba Kobhio Bassek is the first director to examine this medical missionary from a purely African point-of-view.

This drama focuses upon the psychological adjustment problems of a young boy whose family moves him from Africa to Paris, France. Moctar, a boy whose first 11 years were spent in a small village in Mali, is having difficulty adjusting to his new life in Paris. After several years in Paris, Moctar suddenly sees a terrible hyena in the street. When Moctar tries to explain his vision, he becomes the laughingstock of his peers and a patient for the school psychologist. No one believes Moctar, not even his parents, until he is befriended by Paulo who helps Moctar understand.

One of a series of short films inspired by paintings. In this video, Jacques de Loustal's Le Contemplatif or "Duo".

Images of the Port Dauphine subway terminus are accompanied by a text read aloud about masturbation (branler is slang for jacking off) in this short subject.

After much hesitation, a gigolo decides to take a shot of a radical remedy to save his failing virility.

Ninon is a spirited hotel-manager who teaches self-defense classes to her terrified eldery neighbors. Daiga, an aspiring Lithuanian actress newly arrived to Paris, becomes fascinated with the life of a mysteriously beautiful drag performer.

Four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

A compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.

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

The humanitarian aid expedition "Angeles Azules" (Blue Angels), comprising twelve Europeans and six trucks loaded with provisions to alleviate hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, advances across the continent. As a result of the difficulties the team encounters, disorganization gradually takes over the convoy. Each of the members of the group, little by little, yield to their petty, selfish impulses: violence, power, nostalgia - The breakdown of one of the trucks forces Michele and Nadia to wait at an oasis for the arrival of spare parts. But a starving local tribe settles threateningly near them. The chief of the tribe makes a speech they don't understand, which is followed by a macabre purification ceremony.

The meeting of Manuel, a lady's dancer, Petrus, an unfortunate gambler, and Corinne, a fast-food waitress. The drifting of three drop-outs, three solitary dreamers, adventurous waverers.

When a neo-Nazi group of terrorists is set to blow a pop concert off the face of the earth because it is an anti-racist benefit, they are faced with the intrepid Jean-Pierre Mougin, a macho sports reporter with zero tolerance for Nazi hate crimes. Going along with Mougin to stop the bombing is Lyza, whose brother was killed by this group of fascists, and so she is ardently seeking revenge. After Mougin gets his hands on a videotape that reveals the plot to blow up the concert and its audience, he and Lyza join forces. As the fuse gets shorter and shorter, Mougin is also joined by sympathetic street gangs. Thus reinforced, he faces his opposition (including crooked cops) in increasingly more desperate attempts to stop Murmeau, the leader of the Nazi gang, from carrying out his terrorist objective.

Good dope is becoming rare in the North of Paris. Drugstores are being raided by junkies and gangs are nervous, fighting each others: the 'Viets', the 'Blackies', the 'Arabs', the neo-nazis 'Justiciers' and some mean gays. Vincent (Daniel Auteuil) is the good cop coming from Marseilles where he was a gangster. He's a soft method guy but also kicks assses hard and throw lethal dialog lines when needed. With the precious help of 'l'Arbalète'* (Marisa Berenson**), a tox' prostitute ex-member of Vincent's former gang, he will try to put order in that mess. There's also a violent and racist cop (Marcel Bozzuffi), Algeria veteran with hard methods, whose role could be more than to protect and to serve.