Village of Artigat, southern France, summer 1542, during the reign of Francis I. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols marry. A few years later, accused of having committed a robbery, Martin suddenly disappears. When, almost a decade later, a man arrives in Artigat claiming to be Martin, the Guerre family recognizes him as such; but doubts soon arise about his true identity.
France, 1893. Joseph Bouvier attempts to shoot his love who refused to marry him and to commit suicide. Upon release from the filthy asylum where he was placed, with bullets still remaining in his head, he wanders the country roads and rapes and murders many teenagers over years. The judge Rousseau captures him, but to serve his ambition seeks to avoid that Bouvier is simply declared insane.
Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo is assigned to the old Bastiani border fortress where he expects an imminent attack by nomadic fearsome Tartars.
André Fragman, nicknamed "Fairbanks" after his childhood idol by his film projectionist father, returns home from military service. He meets and falls in love with Marie, an aspiring actress who is rehearsing for a stage production of 'Alice in Wonderland'. All his attempts to find a job and a way out end up in failure, his friends Étienne and Jean-Pierre are powerless to help him, and the dreamy yet desperate hero loses his mind.
When Peter, Margaux's American writer husband, leaves Paris in a funk and heads home, she finds herself the single parent of two near teens. She also gets a new assignment at work: to find, sign, and promote new rock singers. She discovers a duo, Jeremy and Michel, and jump-starts their music careers. Jeremy is attracted to the older Margaux, asserts himself with her, befriends her children, and neglects Michel and their music. The kids go to New York to be with their father Peter, freeing Margaux to respond to Jeremy. Does that relationship have any future? And what of the musical duo?
Narcoleptic Finnish naturist as beautiful as Venus is on vacation in Southern France with her husband. She goes for a walk in the field naked and gets lost. A local kid takes her to his village to help her as well as brag to his friends.
The "black robe" in the title of this suspense film belongs to a female lawyer, Florence Nat who has just lost a case in which she defended Simon Risler, a man wrongly accused of murder. Risler escapes before he can be put in prison, and seeks help from attorney Nat in finding the real killer, partly by going after the police inspector who framed him in the first place. A retired surgeon, in the process of setting up a drug rehab clinic gets involved in solving Risler's case, and soon the solution seems to be pointing to high-ranking figures with every desire and ample means to keep the truth well-hidden.
When a real-estate promoter attempts to take over the homes of two electronics whizzes and boot them out, they contrive ingenious ways to inconvenience and harass him. By pooling their knowledge, they are able to pull off a crucial robbery using a very special box of chocolates.
Salomé Lerner just finished writing an autobiography. She goes to a TV show called "Apostrophes", hosted by French TV showman Bernard Pivot. Pivot then imagines a film that could be created from her gripping story. A film entirely made of music because after seeing the young pianist Erik Berchot, Salomé believes seeing her long lost brother, who was a musician as well. A brother she had lost along with her parents in 1943. However, the Lerners did in fact escape the gestapo and might have based themselves in Paris...
Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organised crime into real estate development there: crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early 1980s. In the fictionalised story, Paula Barretto is caught in this underworld because her father was involved in the drug business, her brother is in the real estate scam, and her lover is an armed thief. Although she tries to get out of her corrupt and dangerous environment, it is not an easy task when even the police officers cannot be trusted, and the underworld has informants everywhere.
Industrious accountant David Martinaud claims to be visiting his parents every weekend, but it's merely a cover for the labor-intensive refurbishing of his country cottage. The reason for David's secrecy is that his childhood crush, Lise, lives nearby, and, although she's married, he still believes they'll get together. His devotion to the idea borders on mania, and, when Lise's husband is accidentally killed, he quickly spirals out of control.
In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.
After a long journey, Alain arrives at the Usher mansion to visit his old friend, Roderick Usher. Upon arriving, however, he discovers that Roderick and his sister, Madeline, have been afflicted with a mysterious malady: Roderick's senses have become painfully acute, while Madeline has become nearly catatonic.
Julien est envoyé par son patron à l'île Maurice, où il fait la connaissance d'Henri, un chômeur professionnel. Un soir de beuverie, les deux hommes se soulagent au pied d'une statue sacrée. Offensés par ce sacrilège, les dieux les punissent en leur ôtant leur reflet et en les faisant léviter. Si cette situation leur paraît au début invivable, les deux hommes finissent cependant par tirer parti de ces désavantages pour régler leurs problèmes personnels.
A two-part documentary made for French TV about Georges Perec, directed by his former partner Catherine Binet. It features a mixture of archival footage, scenes from Perec’s films and to-camera readings of excerpts from his work by various actors and friends of the author (Michael Lonsdale, Marina Vlady, Alain Cuny, Sami Frey, Edith Scob, Harry Mathews and others).
For the France 3 show, Mosaïque, Sarah Maldoror met Assia Djebar on Sunday March 29, 1987 on the occasion of the publication of her book Ombre Sultane. She discusses the status of the traditional woman in the Arab Muslim world: "The woman is always on the move, she is never anchored. To the extent that she is always in the process of repudiation, she is in the process of leaving. With Ombre Sultana, I wanted to make the reader feel that these women from elsewhere are like her, even if the reader is Western.
A whimsically paced crime drama that takes you on a journey through deceit and intrigue.
Delphine Seyrig plays a middle-aged woman coping with an ungovernable present and holding out hopes of escaping to a more pleasant past. She leaves her current residence to retreat to her provincial French hometown. Here she dreams of locating and rekindling an old love. Seyrig is less inscrutable here than in her debut feature-film appearance Last Year in Marienbad (61), though the character is just as complex and difficult to please. Grain of Sand was released in France in 1983 as Le Grain de Sable.
