Olivier Hespel

45,000 patients died in French psychiatric hospitals between 1939 and 1945. A single site escaped this carnage: the asylum in Saint-Alban, an isolated village in Lozère. What happened there for it to be an exception? Retracing several decades in the history of this important site of psychiatry, using precious archival films and the accounts of those who worked there, Martine Deyres answers this question and, in doing so, shows how the political courage and poetic audacity that were practised there contributed to changing medicine and society’s perception on madness. Intersecting in the crucible of this movement called “institutional psychotherapy” were members of the Resistance, artists, doctors and philosophers—including Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara and Georges Canguilhem.

Le Bois de Vincennes is a safe harbour for many Parisians. Migrants and natives, prostitutes and stalkers, rich and poor, old and young, downshifters and loners come to this forest in search of themselves and find there an escape from the metropolis. A delicate and profound portrait of a contemporary man and his desperate search for an 'unknown homeland'.

Gare du Nord in Paris is a transit station for all those coming from the suburbs, the provinces or abroad. Accompanied by Simon Mérabet, the son of Algerian immigrants from the Var, Human Geography offers a series of brief meetings with individuals who recount their lives in just a few words before disappearing to take their trains. The crowd of passengers is embodied in these stories, one life after another, and we see how globalization fashions individual destinies, subject to geographical and economic pressures.

The head of a giant European investment bank desperately clings to power when an American hedge fund company tries to buy them out.

Transport Minister Bertrand Saint-Jean is awoken in the middle of the night by his head of staff. A bus has gone off the road into a gully. He has no choice but to go to the scene of the accident. Thus begins the odyssey of a politician in a world that is increasingly more complex and hostile.

Philippe lives in a world controlled by a caste system. Those who play the "game" correctly become higher and more powerful. Phillipe plays the game well but his wife wants him to return to reality. Its a love story after marriage.

Director Christophe Blanc delivers a fast-past thriller set to a background of Finland's stunning landscape. High-end car dealership owner Maxime is pursued by Finnish gangsters over unsatisfactory cars his dead partner sold them.

Yvan finds a burglar in his house. After some consideration, Yvan decides not to call the police and to drop the lad near the nearby city but he ends up giving him a lift home to his parents. Together, they travel through Belgium and meet some extraordinary people and find themselves in ditto situations.

Karim lives in Brussels and is finishing his accounting studies. He soon begins a romantic relationship with Sophie, a young woman he met at a travel agency. But life quickly becomes complicated when you are the son of immigrants, when you are faced, despite your successful studies, with rejection or unemployment, and when you feel torn between two worlds, two cultures! Without resorting to simplistic black-and-white thinking or pessimism, the filmmakers paint an endearing portrait of this couple as they struggle to find themselves, but also with great tenderness.

Thomas Thomas is agoraphobic, has a computer-generated girlfriend, and hasn't left his home in years. Can a prostitute convince him to leave cyberspace and his home for the real world?

A young woman convenes with her extended family in a provincial village where her cousin, in a coma, is hospitalized after attempting suicide.