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From her life in Cairo to being a discor star, from success to suicide, Dalida reigned over the hit parades throughout the world. Although the artist's career began at the same time as popular music emerged as an industry and was acclaimed everywhere as "la marchande de bonheur" (the merchant of happiness). She encountered unhappiness ; she experienced many deaths and rebirths. Her forced march towards fame resembles a frantic search ending in despair.

Tania, a young actress, puts everything at stake for her starring role in Dotez's play. But Dotez, blocked and hostile to Tania, only frees himself as the rehearsals progress, while his actress is exhausted in her daily life, divided between Yan, her lover, and Lila, his little daughter.

Claude Berri, who usually participates in films by directing them, here returns to the screen as Stan, an over-the-hill lothario, much given to quoting Shakespeare, who occasionally goes around naked under his raincoat and exposes himself to strangers, who are usually not interested in his primitive display of genitalia. It also appears that he is unable to sexually satisfy his much younger lover, and he suspects her of having another boyfriend. He earns his living tutoring students (mostly young girls) in English literature. When, in his frustration, he gropes one of the girls in her home during a tutoring session, she protests, her father (who is at home) beats him up, and he is sentenced to a jail term. There, he is teamed up with a slightly loopy murderer. When he gets out of jail, he finds his girlfriend has left for good, and ends his life.

"These portraits are encounters I wanted to be kept from oblivion, even if it is only while you are watching them. They are women who work, who have children, and who, at the same time, keep their independence of mind. I shot 24 portraits of 13 minutes each. I have chosen this short running time for several reasons: not becoming a bother, escape tv adds cuts, shoot the movie quickly, in one pace and without too many scratches. I am not a documentaries maker. I am more like a faces, hands and things lover. To show reality is not my goal. “Reality” is just a word, just like its twin sister “fiction”, which I practice as well, but with a different delight." (Alain Cavalier)

By dint of inventing stories, a boy neglected by his mother comes to lead a double life.

This feature documentary zooms in on Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges borough, where over 75 ethnic groups live side by side in a dizzying swirl of sound and colour. One day, filmmaker Lucie Lachapelle began knocking on the doors that isolated her from her neighbours. The result is a vibrant film about freedom and uprootedness set to urban music composed by Montreal jazz artist Harold Faustin.

A few days in the life of the postal workers and customers at La Courneuve.

The narrator, "Barjo" (nutcase, crap artist), is an obsessive simpleton, given to filling his notebook with verbatim dialog, observed trivia, and oddball speculation on human behavior and the end of the world. When his house burns, he moves in with his twin sister, Fanfan -- an impulsive, quixotic egoist -- and her husband, Charles, the Aluminum King. Charles becomes the focus of the film, as his wife and brother-in-law bewilder him.

In summer, Cecco, a withdrawn teenager, goes to his mother's house in a coastal town. His encounter with a gang of thugs marauding on the beaches will be dramatic.

Le Gone du Chaâba (The Kid of the Chaaba), translated into English as Shantytown Kid by Naima Wolf, is an autobiographical novel by Azouz Begag about his life as a young Algerian boy growing up in a shantytown next to Lyon, France, called the Chaâba by its inhabitants. The story covers a period of approximately three years in the life of the protagonist and deals with issues developing from the clash between two cultures, that of France and that of North Africa, as well as the difficulties of finding a cultural identity between the two. The story focuses on the cultural differences between the Arab and French communities, as well as how the two groups react to each other

Inès, Stella, Marion and Emilie are four young women who become friends and never leave each other. They band together during their teenage years. This film discusses their first meeting and what happens afterward.

A young man in Versailles invites a Parisian girl to his place for dinner. The evening is thrown into turmoil.

An all night party in a building on the outskirts of Paris provides the setting of this provocative French meditation on life and waiting. As the title states, the film centers on seven main characters at the party. Each of them is privately waiting for something and all of them engage in conversations about the fundamental concerns of life, including love, sex, truth and responsibility. Among the seven are a pregnant woman waiting for her baby, a playboy, a gay man, and a young woman with poor taste in men. To make the film, director Francoise Etchegaray gave the actors a sense of who they were supposed to be and what they should do, placed them in a room, and let them improvise their dialog.

The CEO of a recycling company blames lazy staff for declining results. To motivate them, he sends executives to a survival course in the Corsican maquis, hoping to transform them into conquerors. The executives, in suits and ties, find the hostile environment challenging.

This short animated film delves into the mysteries of time: how calendars came to be; why the seasons change; why the year is divided into days, etc. From Babylon to 16th-century Europe, this film presents the history of the measurement of time.

Years ago, Jean Marsan had aspirations to be a scholar. He also had a very serious romance going on. His thick-headed, uncomprehending family soon put an end to both of those unacceptable behaviors, and he spent the rest of his youth tending cows on the family farm. Now he is old, his idiot family members have died, and he's about to sell the farm (now his) to a developer. However, there are still cows to take care of until the sale goes through, and he's not as agile as he used to be. When a young local fellow offers to help him with his farm chores, he grudgingly accepts and their initially antagonistic relationship deepens over the summer. The director of this film grew up in the French Alps on a farm similar to this one and has taken care that the details of farm management are accurately and precisely depicted. Of particular interest to cheese connoisseurs is the footage of the two men making a delicious but probably unhygienic local cheese.

This documentary follows the French soccer team on their way to victory in the 1998 World Cup in France. Stéphane Meunier spent the whole time filming the players, the coach and some other important characters of this victory, giving us a very intimate and nice view of them, as if we were with them.

A French adaptation of Neil Simon's play "Laughter on the 23rd Floor", staged by Jacques Rosny.

In Nazi-occupied Paris, a young accompanist named Sophie Vasseur gets a job with famed singer Irene Brice. As Irene's husband Charles, a businessman collaborating with the Nazis, wrestles with his conscience, Sophie becomes obsessed with Irene, taking on the role of maid as well as accompanist, living life vicariously through Irene's triumphs and affairs.

A old red riding hood, badly crippled after killing a monster many years ago, comes up with a sinister plan to dance again.

The son of an editor discovers that one of his father's writers is a former criminal from the Eastern bloc.

Fleeing the mafia, Vladimir, a young romantic Russian in love with Rimbaud, ends up without money in Paris. After taking part in a game show, where presenter Victor Lalumière bows him, he is found by the Russian mafia who wants to kill him.

Beatrice Rosen's acting debut.

Three runaway children end up on an island where a lonely sculptor lives.

Alone at the wheel of their 38 tons, three men leave for a humanitarian mission to Armenia: Amine, 30 years old, who chose this form of action after having experienced difficult times, "Papy", 62 years old, former director of a transport company, prematurely retired, and Jerome, just out of a tumultuous adolescence. They have to reach Yerevan after several weeks on the road through Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia and have to face many political, climatic and geographical difficulties. In the course of the obstacles to be overcome, the strong times of friendship or conflict, the empty times of waiting or solitude, in the closed space of the cabins, the face of each one is revealed. Three destinies, three ages of life and, in common, a love of travel and the road. For each one a part of shadow, of drift, of secret.

Following a bet with his friends, Antoine steals a jacket. The life of his parents will be turned upside down.

Chris Marker’s Bullfight in Okinawa is a bizarre, 4 min documentary that introduces viewers to Japan’s subterranean past time of bullfighting. Part of Markers five-film “Bestiary” series, Bullfight employs observational documentary techniques and, in particular, Marker’s camerawork is impressive — tight framed shots, free-hand pans, and quick zooms all contribute to the film’s urgent sense of tension — and, if it weren’t for the suspense inducing music, this short-gem would be damn close to pure objective documentary cinema.

A documentary on the entire works of the Italian sculptor Michelangelo Pistoletto who lives in Vienna. His mirror-images make him one of the most original, manifold personalities in the European art scene.

August 1939. The fate of four young people, Ramona, Georges, Brigitte and Hans is upset by the outbreak of war.

The sudden approach of a giant meteorite to Earth gives Tintin nightmares of death. Luckily, it lands in the Arctic Sea. Then, Tintin is appointed press delegate aboard Captain Haddock's ship Aurora, along with an international expedition to find it.

On a whim, the long-married Hélène decides to look up a former lover of hers. At his apartment, she is met by the man's grown son, Julien, who tells her that his father died just a few days before. Before long, she has become Julien's lover, but she is also increasingly becoming attached to the rather unlikely idea that Julien and she are genetically related. Meanwhile, her cardiologist husband cannot fathom her increasingly bizarre behavior. It is one thing to have an affair, even with a much younger man, but she seems to be edging ever-closer to the borderline between sanity and madness.

Sarah, 24, brings her boyfriend Olivier, 30, home to meet her very bourgeois family who are staunch supporters of deportment, education and good manners. Alone in the bedroom, waiting for lunch to be served, Sarah performs fellatio on Olivier. They are interrupted by Sarah's parents and two brothers who have been watching the act through a two-way mirror and consider it poorly carried out.

Michel, a children's book author, has always been successful in life until the day his wife leaves him for a Chinese person. Planning on killing his rival, he starts looking for them.

Antoine, 11, is on holiday with his grandfather. One night he catches thieves hiding their booty in a pond. Antoine seizes the 40 million. But Liza, his new friend, is the daughter of one of the criminals. Both children soon face threats.

An old woman who is unaware that she is near death, falls in love with her son’s young American tutor.

Tippi is no ordinary child. She believes that she has the gift of talking to animals and that they are like brothers to her. 'I speak to them with my mind, or through my eyes, my heart or my soul, and I see that they understand and answer me.' Tippi is the daughter of French filmmakers and wildlife photographers, Alain Degre and Sylvie Robert, who have captured her on film with some of Africa's most beautiful and dangerous animals. Tippi shares her thoughts and wisdom on Africa, its people and the animals she has come to know and love. Often her wisdom is beyond her years, and her innocence and obvious rapport with the animals is both fascinating and charming.

The story of Robert Hughes-Lambert, who was captured by Nazis when his active homosexuality was discovered during the filming of Mermoz (1943).

Ten year old Noemie, fed up with being shunted from one separated parent's home to another, puts her foot down and demands to stay in one place all the time. The new arrangement, however, turns out to be a nightmare.

The legend of the Three oriental kings. Melchior, a hereditary prince of a small kingdom in Northern Persia and accompanied by his friends and mentors Gaspar and Balthazar, sets off on a long journey of initiation that will confront them with their destiny.

Iranian Iradj Azimi directed this French historical drama re-creating events depicted in the famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). The ill-fated voyage of the frigate Medusa begins when it departs Rochefort for Senegal in 1816. After striking a sandbar off the African coast, 150 civilians row safely to shore, but Captain Chaumareys (Jean Yanne) orders 140 soldiers and sailors onto a raft (minus supplies) and has it cut loose. Only 14 survive from the 140, creating a scandal back in France. Gericault (Laurent Terzieff) later talks to three of the survivors while researching his painting. Work on this film began in 1987, but sets destroyed by Hurricane Hugo caused delays, so the film was not completed until 1990. However, it then remained undistributed until an incident in which writer-director Azimi slashed his wrists in front of French Ministry of Culture officials.

Two actors portray eighteen Yorkshire villagers, who offer several iterations of their lives depending on whether or not they lit a cigarette at a certain point in time.

Amélie, a 20-year-old girl, loses both her job as a waitress and her home. Without money, she tries to survive on the streets.

This romantic, political drama is about the reunion of an Algerian woman who abandoned her lover 35 years earlier to live in France, and the lover who chose to stay in Algeria and fight the French colonials.

Set in the late 1960s, a family of Gypsies live in a dilapidated pavilion in the western suburbs of Paris.

A man encounters colorful characters while driving a taxi in Papua New Guinea.

A cinematic metaphor, conceived as part of a compilation of films on AIDS, this is an emotional translation of the disease. The juxtaposition of music and images creates conflicts involving elements that, taken separately, would appear insignificant. Produced within the framework of SI FILM DA. (LightCone)

An opera singer rehearses with her pianist while a pair of chimney sweeps work next door with a blaring vacuum cleaner.

Set within a housing project located on the outskirts of Alsace, this French docudrama features a largely non-professional cast and centers on the interrelationship between a pair of elderly French nationals, Arab immigrants and a newly arrived family from Africa as they struggle to find niches in their rapidly changing world.

Julien, a boy in the sixth grade, was badly depressed by the divorce of his parents. But he soon found that half of the class had come from broken families.

Anne is a figure painter who has been in a melancholy slump for a number of years. She is awakened from this dulled state by news that she only has a year to live. Thus, when she sees an interesting man with a lively appearance during a visit to the library, she decides to try and track him down, perhaps to arrange for a sitting. It turns out that the man is a serial killer, but, given her short life-span, this knowledge does not prevent Anne from developing a relationship with him, though she is understandably skittish around him.

Franny, an alcoholic, develops a relationship with Jack, a telephone crisis hotline operator. Jack is a recovering addict himself and is fighting his own demons; he killed a young boy while D.U.I.. As Franny and Jack become closer, they help one other become healthier and happier people.