Mathieu Amalric

The Emerson String Quartet records their last album, Infinite voyage, in three days, after 47 years of music together. For this farewell, the string quartet invited soprano Barbara Hannigan to join them, and a film was born. Their precise, inhabited work, the moments of enthusiasm and fright, the research and the jokes, the evening meals and the morning confidences, the age limit of these men and the flamboyance of this woman nourishing each other, the admiring friendship full of irony and joyful rigor, the craft and yet the discovery, the humor as a cog towards concentration, the individual and the group… all this composes a portrait of the usually invisible making of music. Before everyone goes their own way.

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting. Music in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…

Mathieu Amalric’s film with John Zorn began as a European TV commission that was quickly abandoned in favor of something more intimate: an ongoing dialogue between two friends that will always be a work-in-progress.

Like Reger – the character Thomas Bernhard placed on a museum bench in front of a painting by Tintoretto, an ‘old master’ if ever there was one – an actor finds himself alone and stranded after a notorious virus closes theatres indefinitely. Here he is, wandering through an empty theatre, walking through pointless backstage areas and stumbling onto a street haunted by masked passers-by. Having convinced a fireman to look after him and his explosives, he tells him and the silence around him of his disgust with, amongst other things, the Heideggerians, the lack of punctuality, people who admire as opposed to respect and the State’s appropriation of children. In the overlapping of film and theatre, despair and survival, 1980s Austria and 2020s France, Bernhard’s text gains fresh resonance, “…and as far as culture is concerned, in this country your stomach is only there to churn.”

At dawn, Clarisse takes a last look at her husband and two sleeping children, hesitates to leave a note, and hits the road. A desperate escape that gradually reveals its layers as Clarisse — who seems to have an extra-sensory connection to the family she has left behind — loses herself in the world.

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting. Music in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…

In a poetic composition of song, narration, and images, this film follows Canadian soprano and orchestra conductor Barbara Hannigan, accompanied by the Ludwig Orchestra, as she records her album Crazy Girl Crazy. Why did she choose these three pieces, in essence so different, but which intimately resonate with her: Berio’s Sequenza III, Berg’s Lulu Suite, and Gershwin’s Girl Crazy? With this musical voyage peering into a world of precision and sharing, where a passionate woman brings forth a vocal tour de force, Mathieu Amalric, César winner for Best Actor in 2005 and 2008, shows us once more his talent behind the camera with this new opus that goes beyond a mere artist’s portrait.

An actress will play Barbara, the French singer. The shoot will soon start. The actress works on her character, her voice, the songs, scores, the gestures, knitting, scenes she has to learn, things are going okay, there's progress, development, she is even overwhelmed. The film director also works, through his encounters, through archives, music, he let's himself be submerged, overwhelmed like the actress, by the actress.

A series of 8 short films. Each film was inspired by an Edward Hopper painting. The series has been commissioned by Arte France and produced by Didier Jacob, En Haut des Marches. The 8 shorts are 'Next to Last' by Mathieu Amalric with Frederick Wiseman as Edward Hopper, 'The Muse' by Sophie Barthes with Michael Stuhlbarg, 'Hope' by Dominique Blanc with Clemence Poesy, 'First Row Orchestra' by Sophie Fiennes, 'Conference at Night' by French director Valerie Mrejen, 'Rupture' by young animation director Valerie Pirson, 'Berlin Night Window' by German director Hannes Stohr, 'Mountain' by Danish director Martin de Turah.

In “C’est presque au bout du monde”, I explore a mystery which fascinates me : where do these inhuman voices come from ? Where in the body is the source of this unsettling anomaly of singing ? - Mathieu Amalric

In their blue hotel room, a clandestine couple of two married lovers plan an impossible future, as death shutters their already frail tranquillity. Now, the noose tightens more and more around innocents and sinners; but, was there a crime?

In a private collection in Arlington, French actor and director Mathieu Amalric, who won the Best director award in Cannes) takes his camera to one of Hopper's latest masterpiece, one of the most mysterious as well. As we hear the four last Lieder of Strauss or extracts from a Kennedy speech, that Hopper listened to while working, Amalric keeps pursuing the hidden meanings of his painting in its darkest corners. (With American documentarist Frederick Wiseman doing Edward Hopper's voice).

In this contemporary adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s brilliant, eponymous 17th century play, the enigmatic Alcandre is now a hotel concierge who uses the myriad in-house high-tech security cameras to show worried father Pridamant the whereabouts and travails of his son, Clindor. As Pridamant witnesses the conflicting romances involving his estranged son, Corneille’s modernist meta-narrative is transposed to contemporary Paris, underscoring the ambiguous nature of love, wealth and desire in an age of consumerism. (Chicago International Film Festival)

After leaving France in search of a better life in America, a television producer returns with a group of burlesque dancers to take the Paris club scene by storm.

Documentary about Joann Sfar (born August 28, 1971) is a French comics artist, comic book creator and film director. He is considered one of the most important artists of the new wave of Franco-Belgian comics. His main influences are Fred and André Franquin as well as Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Will Eisner, Hugo Pratt and John Buscema. From 2009 to 2010, Sfar wrote and directed Gainsbourg: Une Vie Heroique, a biopic of the illustrious French songwriter and singer, of whom Sfar is a self-confessed fanatic. The film, which draws substantially on Sfar's abilities as a comic book artist through its extensive use of fantasy artwork, animation and puppetry, was released in 2010 to general critical acclaim.

A journalist must portray a sociologist.

A television director decides to use his own life and marriage as an inspiration for his latest project.

A post-script to his "Le Stade De Wimbledon"

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.

A young man returns to the family home to face a childhood trauma: his brother's suicide, but nobody in the family is willing to help him.

A young man who has just experienced a breakup makes a variety of encounters throughout a day.

An old man, former clown, comes back in the neighborhood where he used to lived for the funeral of his ex-wife, and finds old friends with whom he had lost contact.