Discoveries from France World Cinema

Two very different cops are forced to work together...

Jean-Jacques Lestrade is the owner of a renowned veterinary clinic in Paris who lives in a luxurious apartment. He is part of Parisian high society and lives a wealthy lifestyle surrounded by young women and money. He relies on his trusty accountant, Jérôme Bouvier, to manage his finances. All goes well until the day that Béatrice Flamand, a tax inspector, shows up at his clinic, at which point Lestrade is now in trouble.

A warm summer in Montreal. Two black men, Man and Bouba, share an apartment. Man is an ambitious author, writing on The Great Novel. Bouba is a lazy amateur philosopher who quotes the Koran. Man's habit of picking up young white women makes many young white men jealous...

In autumn of 1526, the Emperor, Charles V, sends his German landsknechts led by Georg von Frundsberg to march towards Rome. The inferior papal armies, commanded by Giovanni de'Medici, try to chase them in the midst of a harsh winter. Nevertheless, the Imperial armies manage to cross the rivers along their march and get cannons thanks to the maneuvers of its Lords. In a skirmish, Giovanni de'Medici is wounded in the leg by a falconet shot. The attempts to cure him fail and he dies. The Imperial armies assault Rome. The film is beautifully but unassumingly set, and shows the hard conditions in which war is waged and its lack of glory. It ends straightforwardly with the declaration made after the death of Giovanni de'Medici by the commanders of the armies in Europe of not using again fire weapons because of their cruelty.

Irène is the unhappy wife of a wealthy publisher, Jacques Voisin-Larive, who cares about her no more than a beautiful piece of furniture. Her meeting with Étienne, a young cabinetmaker with whom she falls in love, turns her dismal existence upside down. Not wanting to reveal her condition to her lover, she pretends to be a modest maid, employed by the Voisin-Larive. At the end of a weekend spent with her lover, Irène discovers that she is pregnant. The fragile balance of their existence is suddenly broken. Taking the initiative, she reveals her affair to Jacques and tells him about her desire to divorce. But her husband has no intention of giving her back her freedom...

Yann, an eccentric performance poet, hopes to change the world and fight injustice armed with his megaphone. After his property is seized, he shows up at his daughter's house for the weekend. Now over 60, Yann realizes that Dune no longer has room in her life to continue dealing with her troublesome father.

Carré is the boss of the BRB (Brigade for the Repression of Banditry). 3 years earlier, he arrested a big mobster, Kancel. Today, thanks to an extraction, Kancel kidnaps the cop. He has 96 hours to elicit a single information: know who gave him.

Arsène Muselier returns to his home village at the end of the First World War. His only injury is a head wound, which sometimes provokes periods of delirium and fury. As he renews his acquaintance with the people he left behind - his mother, the old farmhand who brought him up after his father's death, his former girlfriend, and many others - he becomes fascinated by the legend of La Vouivre, a creature with the body of a woman who lives in the marsh, surrounded by vipers. One day, Arsène sees the strange woman - she is naked, beautiful, alluring, and he is instantly enchanted by her. Can she be real, or is she merely a creation of his damaged mind...?

Studio Ghibli is Japan's most successful animation studio, with helmers Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro") and Isao Takahata ("Grave of The Fireflies," "The Tale of Princess Kaguya") creating a bonanza for producer/prexy Toshio Suzuki. Generously adorned with clips from their films and their influences, the docu follows Ghibli's arc from a mid-'60s rebellion against working conditions at Toei Co. to its present powerhouse position, complete with public fun park. All interviews are illuminating, but Miyazaki is teasingly confined to pic's tete-a-tete finale with esteemed French comic artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Meeting of the wizened European, whose imprint is on films from "Blade Runner" to "The Fifth Element," and the apparently relaxed Nipponese helmer makes an interesting contrast, and will be of special interest to Francophiles. All credits are impeccable

In 1958, while revolution is rumbling in Beirut, three sisters spend their holidays in an isolated village of Lebanese mountains: rebellious Nada, romantic Eva, and the eldest Layla, a good woman, beloved by everyone. But the war threatens and the sudden entrance of two French summer vacationers leads Layla to revolt against patriarchal society.

The Man In The Hat sets off from Marseilles in a small Fiat 500. On the seat beside him is a framed photograph of an unknown woman. Behind him is a 2CV into which is squeezed Five Bald Men. Why are they chasing him? And how can he shake them off? As he travels North through France, he encounters razeteurs, women with stories to tell, bullfights, plenty of delicious food, a damp man, mechanics, nuns, a convention of Chrystallographers and much more, coming face to face with the vivid eccentricities of an old country.

Dr. Brézé and his sons, all surgeons with limited abilities fight any competition on their sector with all means.

After a bad breakup, a college-aged Parisian moves into her father's flat only to discover that he is living with his new girlfriend - a young woman her age.

Poland is under Communist rule. An exiled Polish theater director is in England, enthusiastically preparing an abstract play which will criticize the authoritarian Polish government. His sons might not share his political views, though.

Paul Martin is the subservient brown-nosing youngster who needs quick advancement up the hierarchy to pay for the modern lifestyle he is buying on credit. Seeing that marrying his immediate superior's daughter will not get him the results he wants, he begins plotting the demise of the head of the company. The company itself specializes in holiday travel and unscrupulously brutalizes its customers for maximum profit, spending more thought on publicity gimmicks than customer service...

The small South American republic of Guadalarma is under the rule of despot Don Salvador, surrounded by a civil guard, his mistress (La Morenita), his henchman (Don Ramón) and the fortress governor (the venal Don Gaspar). One morning, the city's French jeweler Michel Dumartin receives a visit from a client named José Llanos, one of the regime's fiercest opponents. Llanos is soon denounced and shot dead by Salvador's men. At the same time, Dumartin was accused of complicity with the rebels. Arrested and imprisoned in the fortress, he is ripe for the death penalty.

A rebellious socially-conscious man travels to Nepal to find his dead-beat dad. There, he meets Jane, a beautiful hippie girl hooked on drugs. He's forced to steal artefacts for his father's slimy employer to earn money to help Jane.

Happy and accomplished, Ellias becomes the new artistic director of a famous French Haute Couture house. When he learns that his father, whom he has not seen for many years, has just died of a heart attack, Ellias goes to Quebec to settle the estate. The young creator will discover that he has inherited much worse than his father's fragile heart.

Follows Joseph Ferdinand Chavel a French postman who built a palace in the French countryside over 33 years.

While his wife, Catherine, is finalizing their divorce, serial philanderer Andre invites his latest conquest, Catherine’s best friend, Patricia, over for dinner. Over the course of the evening, Andre shares his entire romantic history since first coming to London as a young man, including his liaisons with his former boss, a marriage-minded young girl and a kindhearted Frenchwoman.

Poor Benjamin gets stuck in a time-loop while on detention with his high-school crush.

This Great War drama opens in the trenches during an artillery bombardment. Receiving bayonet wounds, young Simon (Guillaume Depardieu) drops out of the action, joining other injured soldiers at a Brittany hospital. One day he meets schoolteacher Marthe (Clotilde Courau), who lives in the household of the hospital's head doctor (Bernard Giraudeau). Soon a romance begins to develop. Cinematography by Kevin Jewison, son of director Norman Jewison.

Three students celebrate their graduation with a visit of the Paris catacombs. When they discover a bunker, little do they know it's not the only thing that Nazi have left behind...

Casablanca 1942. While French Police Chief Maurice Desjardins is busy having careless fun with some loose girls, members of the French Resistance kill a man at the harbor and steal his briefcase full of important documents from the Third Reich. At an apartment building in the distance, Andre Kuhn watches the whole operation through his powerful binoculars. He is posing as a businessman but actually working as a spy for the Germans a fact totally ignored by his live-in girlfriend Teresa Villar, a beautiful Spanish singer who works at El Dorado Night Club. Andre telephones Max von Stauffen, the head of German Intelligence in Casablanca, to inform him of what he has just witnessed. Max tells him to stay put until he arrives in order to get the information personally but, by the time he reaches Andres apartment, he finds him dead with a gun shot on his temple.

Julian, 25, and Louis, 12, are two brothers who work and live on a barge in the centre of Paris. They transport gravel and resort to petty crime to make ends meet. They have grown up alone and now they are inseparable, wedded to a life on the river. A receiver of stolen goods offers them the opportunity of a lifetime, to steal a painting by Manet from the Musée d'Orsay. Louis takes charge of the theft and, against the odds, he succeeds in removing it from the gallery and taking it aboard his barge. Rosalie, a museum guard, follows Louis to his home and confronts him. After a fight, the two brothers secure Rosalie in the hold of their boat and make a quick getaway. Later, Rosalie emerges from her hidey hole and makes the brothers an unexpected offer...

Paris, 1984. A group of friends contend with the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.

French filmmaker Eric Lartigau directs the anarchic buddy comedy Bullit and Riper, originally released as Mais qui a tue Pamela Rose? French comedic television stars Kad Merad and Olivier Barroux are both the protagonists and the screenwriters. As a parody of Hollywood cop films, the story is set somewhere in the American Midwest as fabricated by the French. After losing his regular partner, FBI agent Richard Bullit (Merad) gets assigned to the book-learned cop Riper (Barroux) to investigate the death of a stripper. American movie stereotypes abound, such as shock jock Phil Canon (Gérard Darmon) and sheriff Steve Marley (Jean-Paul Rouve).

Summer, 1967. La Goulette, the touristic beach of Tunisi, is the site where three nice seventeen-year-old girls live: Gigi, Sicilian and Catholic; Meriem, Tunisian and Muslim; Tina, French and Jewish. They would like to have their first sexual experience during that summer, challenging their families. Their fathers, Youssef, Jojo and Giuseppe, are old friends and their friendship will be in crisis because of the girls, while Hadj, an old rich Arab, would like to marry Meriem.

Using fossilized DNA, a scientist resurrects one of nature's most fearsome predators, a sabretooth tiger. Scientific ambition turns deadly, however, when the creature escapes and begins savagely stalking its prey - the human race.

25 years of the life of Marie, a Parisian party girl, first teenager leaving her mother at 17, then short star of the song, and finally mother of a teenage girl, Esther, who flees as she fled her mother.

Willy Ferrière is a gambler living beyond his means, and his mistress is as greedy as he's dead broke. One day, he says out of loud in a a Montparnasse café that he would give 100,000 francs to get rid of his wealthy aunt so he could claim his inheritance. Someone secretly lets Willy know it's a deal. The old lady is murdered, and a low-life criminal is manipulated to be the perfect suspect. But Superintendant Maigret feels something is wrong.

Richard Dacier owns a tour agency specialized on organizing safaris for European tourists eager to confront the African wild life. Actually, he took the job after his father and never went into the savanna by himself. As he owes big money to some mobster, he is compelled to convey a fake tourist, with a suspicious suitcase, toward Mozambic. To avoid suspicion from the authorities, he is supposed to tour a group of tourists as usual. The only problem - he is completely unexperienced as a guide!

Fifty years old, three years past of unemployment, benefits decreasing very quickly... Gerard is at the end of the rope when a position is offered him in Indonesia. To win the favor of his new employer, Gerard invites him to dinner at home. Fatal Error ! Terrified at the idea of not being up to par, his wife Colette begs Alexandre, their neighbor to help. Communication guru, Alexander accepts the challenge and gives a makeover to the couple in twenty-four hours. Apartment, decoration, lifestyle, dinner menu, uniforms, culture... Everything !

After the Club Med and skiing, what happened to the Bronzés 27 years later? Early response: the same, and worse.

According to legend, a group of women escaped from Atlantis just before the destruction of the continent. They took refuge on a mysterious island, and founded a kingdom. Men who dared approach the island, were devoured by these sexually voracious Atlanteans, and thus they were called "gobblers".

Vincent tells the story of Jean, a character who is a part of him, without being him. In this story Jean meets Stacey. Among the echoes of today's society the professional and private relationship of a filmmaker and an actress at work is growing. Notre Histoire is a modern tragi-comedy, a love letter to a woman, a tribute to a neighborhood victim of terrorism, a self-portrait, a social criticism, the description of a relationship between a filmmaker and an actress, in the center of which desire and urgency to work mix.

Jean, a married 40-year-old filmmaker, and his young working class lover, Catherine, engage in a circular series of spectacular blow-ups and tentative reunions, their mutual desire a fire that burns them again and again.

Haiti, 1962: A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses an old family secret to a group of new friends - never imagining that this strange tale will convince a heartbroken classmate to do the unthinkable.

Nothing gets by Simone, even though she's blind. An adorable, incredibly precocious ten-year-old girl, Simone sets herself the task of coping with (and sometimes manipulating) the many offbeat charact... read more ers that surround her- including her broken-hearted father, an aging anarchist beekeeper, a beloved and asthmatic quasi-mother-in-law, a priest in the midst of a crisis of faith, and a biker with a wandering heart, for whom she has unconditional love. And then, of course, there's the village in which she lives, where everyone knows your business and makes it their own. No wonder Simone feels that she lives her life like a reel of film jumping in the sprockets of a projector. Life is strange and complicated enough, and then an aviator falls from the sky, threatening everything Simone loves the most.

Young Remi, a foundling, lives on the farm run by his impoverished foster parents. When their money runs out, unbeknown to his foster-mother, Rémi is sold by his hard-hearted foster father to an old street performer named Vitalis. Vitalis was once a famous opera singer, but became destitute after a tragic love affair.

The Legend Of Earl Durand was the story of a young child whose family lived near DuBois, Wyoming and made Earl live in a hut in the wild because they thought he had a contagious disease. When the local Aboriginal people discovered his plight, they took him under their wing so he grew up as a sort of wild man, completely able to live off the land. He was known as the "Robin Hood" of the West because he hunted game on Federal land which was very illegal and gave the meat to the poor.

Bilal is 17 years old, a Kurdish boy from Iraq. He sets off on an adventure-filled journey across Europe. He wants to get to England to see his love who lives there. Bilal finally reaches Calais, but how do you cover 32 kilometers of the English Channel when you can't swim? The boy soon discovers that his trip won't be as easy as he imagined... The community of struggling illegal aliens in Calais

Alone in a secluded mansion, Giacomo Casanova cries out then collapses. When the mysterious and beautiful writer, Elisa von der Recke, comes to visit, it breathes new life into the old man. A movie that captures the myth of the greatest seducer of all times, Casanova, his story is told both through fiction and on-stage opera performances that unravel the tale of his adventures, his passions, and ultimately his fear of death.

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

Aline never managed to get closure from the death of her 17-year-old son in a street fight. When she sees the assai- lant recently released from prison, she decides to cook up a plan to avenge her dead son. Things go unexpectedly as she gets to know the young man and her determination is tested.

Sisif, a railwayman, saves a young girl named Norma orphaned by a train crash and raises her as his own daughter alongside his son, Elie. As she becomes an adult, Sisif grapples with whether to tell Norma the truth about her parentage.

Stella is 6 but she is going to school for the first time. Happy, exuberant (maybe too much) she is a lovely child, but is often absent. Her parents say she is fragile. She tells her teacher, Céline, she fell when asked why she has a few bruises. Is it child abuse or real immune deficiency? The doubt is growing in the mind of those who meet the child. Worried, Céline notes every injury until the day the family moves without telling anyone.

How a young and wild tomboy Tunisian girl became a great actress by accident. Claudia Cardinale : the fanciful destiny of a paradoxical movie star, who appeared in Federico Fellini's, Luchino Visconti's, Blake Edwards' and Sergio Leone's films.

The first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, 'Flight of the Red Balloon' tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's first Western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse.

A married man who killed the wife of his best friend during a tryst feels compelled to turn himself in.

The mistress of a wealthy man misses material comforts when she leaves him for a younger lover.

Fantastique is a magic-realistic coming-of-age in Guinea-Conakry. We follow the 14-year-old contortionist Fanta, who juggles between care for her ailing mother, school, and what she loves the most: Training with the acrobatic circus Amoukanama, with the hopes of joining their next big tour. Trying to bridge all expectations, Fanta starts to doubt what she really wants, searching for her own voice.

In a village somewhere on Reunion Island, Nelson, 10, dreams of being a singer and has signed up for Star Kids. Her friend Mia, accompanied by her little brother Zizou, decides to find a coach for her to help her prepare for the competition. His choice fell on Pierre Leroy, singer coming from Paris on a singing tour in a hotel by the sea, where Nelson's mother works. But the current does not pass between Pierre, lonely and disillusioned, and Nelson, proud and obstinate. Will their one thing in common, the love of singing, be strong enough to bring them together and heal their wounds?

Thirty-year-old Ben is about to marry Juliette. His quiet, ordered life will fall to pieces when he meets up again with the person he secretly wants to see the most: Vanessa, the high school bombshell who never so much as looked in his direction. She's back in Paris, and the only person she now knows is him…

Good Boys Use Condoms is a short story of a man changing condoms when changing sexual partner. It is from a series of short erotic films promoting condoms. These films were made for French TV.

Plant loving Hilda has created a museum where she preserves endangered and rare plants from all over the world. Meanwhile, Attilem, a new genetically modified cereal, is launched on the market. Growing with little water and fertilizer while generating high crop field, Attilem looks like an ideal solution to eradicate starvation and provide an alternative to diminishing oil reserves. But nothing is at it seems...

Young John Anderson is captivated by jazz musician Billy Cross when he performs on the remote airstrip of his Western Australian outback hometown after his plane is diverted. Years later, now a family man and making a meagre living tracking dingoes and playing trumpet in a local band, John still dreams of joining Billy on trumpet and makes a pilgrimage to Paris.

The story of actor Kirk Douglas, the man and the legend, one of the last stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. An epic journey through the 20th century and the entire history of Hollywood. A testimony of the huge scope of his life and the scale of the myth. The untameable Kirk Douglas, the ragman's son.

Six teenage delinquents and a recently released ex-con are given a unique chance at redemption. Dropped into a dense forest, the ex-con must lead the troubled youths to safety while imparting valuable life lessons. However, as they navigate the treacherous terrain, a mysterious and menacing presence stalks them, turning their journey into a desperate fight for survival.

This modest, unpretentious French film is a streamlined version of the true story previously cinematized as The Song of Bernadette (1943). Daniele Ajort plays the simple 19th-century French peasant girl who insists that she has experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary. Once this sighting becomes common knowledge, Bernadette's very existence becomes a religious and political hot potato. Thousands of people flock to the grotto at Lourdes where Bernadette claims she has seen the Holy Mother, believing that the waters therein contain recuperative powers. Bernadette dies under a cloud of controversy, but is ultimately elevated to sainthood by the Vatican.