1° French Online Film Festival

Disculpen el inglés, pero así vino la información original...

14-29 January 2011
myfrenchfilmfestival.com

Unifrance in partnership with Allociné, with the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is organizing the first French online film festival open to Internet users around the world.

The objective is to take fully into account the evolution of cultural consumption and to reach a new audience for French cinema abroad.

UniFrance is launching, in partnership with Allociné, this new and unprecedented event, to spotlight young French filmmakers.

myfrenchfilmfestival.com will take place from 14 to 29 January 2011.

The selection comprises ten feature films (first and second films recently released in France) and ten short films, as well as a classic film.

The films will be available by Video On Demand (VOD), in original version and subtitled in several languages (German, English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, etc.).

Internet users will be able to vote for their favourite film.
Three prizes will be awarded at the end of the festival: a prize awarded by the public, another by foreign bloggers, the third by the international press.

The festival’s website will be online in December and give free access to the trailers and to many exclusive online interviews.

FEATURE FILM SELECTION
• Adieu Gary by Nassim Amaouche with Jean-Pierre Bacri
In a working class city, abandoned by most of its population, some inhabitants stay in spite of everything because they were born and grew up there: Francis, Samir and Sarah (who believes that Gary Cooper is her father and is waiting for him).

• Bus Palladium. by Christopher Thompson with Marc-André Grondin.
A rock’n roll band, a group of friends who have met with success, and a girl who will disrupt it all.

• Complices by Frédéric Mermoud with Gilbert Melki and Emmanuelle Devos
Two police detectives are investigating the disappearance of a teenage couple and find themselves confronted with the problems in their own lives.

• Espion(s) by Nicolas Saada with Guillaume Canet and Géraldine Pailhas
A young baggage handler is hired as spy by the French counter-intelligence agency after being involved in spite of himself in an affair involving the explosion of a diplomatic pouch in an airport.

• La Famille Wolberg by Axelle Ropert with François Damiens
Simon Wolberg is the mayor of a small provincial town, loving husband, overbearing father and provocative son. The film recounts the escapades of this man obsessed with his family.

• L’Autre by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Tridivic with Dominique Blanc
Anne-Marie leaves Alex when she realizes they no longer have the same aspirations: he wants to settle down, she wants to keep her freedom. But when Alex finds a new mistress, Anne-Marie becomes crazy with jealousy.

• Le Bal des actrices by Maïwenn with Karin Viard and Charlotte Rampling
A director is shooting a documentary film on actresses. She shows all their personalities: manipulative, fragile, lying, moving, etc. But she quickly gets involved in their little games, for better or worse.

• Qu’un seul tienne et les autres suivront by Léa Fehner with Pauline Etienne and Reda Kateb
Three people are brought together by chance in a prison visiting room: Stéphane who was just offered the deal of his life, Zorah who is trying to deal with her son’s death, and Laure, who has fallen in love for the first time with a convict.

• Tête de Turc by Pascal Elbé with Roschdy Zem and Ronit Elkabetz
A teenager of 14, an emergency doctor, a cop looking for revenge, a mother fighting for her family, a man crushed by his wife’s death see their destinies linked after an accident.

• Tout ce qui brille by Géraldine Nakache and Hervé Mimran with Leïla Bekhti
Ely and Lila are childhood friends living in the Paris suburbs. They dream of entering a world they don’t belong to, where everything seems to shine like gold.

Classic film not in competition:
• French Cancan by Jean Renoir (1955) with Jean Gabin

SHORT FILM SELECTION
• Babel by Hendrick Dusollier
• Cabossés by Louise Prémonville
• Chienne d’histoire by Serge Avédikian
• C’est gratuit pour les filles by Claire Burger and Marie Amachoukeli
• ¿Dónde está Kim Basinger? by Edouard Deluc
• En attendant que la pluie cesse by Charlotte Joulia
• L’Homme à la Gordini by Jean-Christophe Lie
• Mémoire d’une jeune fille dérangée by Keren Marciano
• Petit dragon by Bruno Collet
• Une pute et un poussin by Clément Michel

Since 1949, the Unifrance organization has promoted French cinema around the world. It conducts studies to provide French film professionals with a wide range of information concerning the international film market. It also organizes events and festivals to facilitate the exposure of French cinema to new audiences. Lastly, it supports the distribution of French films abroad.

Allociné is the most popular French website for information about cinema. Created in 2003, it provides quick access to a rich database concerningfilm releases, DVDs and film professionals (directors, actors, etc.)

Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' (The Guardian)

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Since her 1988 debut Chocolat, Claire Denis has established herself as one of France's most respected film directors, with a wide-ranging body of work and a taste for danger. Her latest film, White Material, which stars Isabelle Huppert, draws again upon her colonial African childhood, and its violence has sparked controversy in the French press. Not that she cares…

One of the lingering charms of the Left Bank of Paris in the 21st century is that, although much of the area has long since surrendered to chain stores and fast-food joints, the streets between Boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Mouffetard are still dotted with fleapit cinemas with names such as L'Accattone, Studio Galande and Le Champo. On any given afternoon – to take a random sample from the programmes on offer in these places last week – you can take in Battleship Potemkin, a Buñuel retrospective, a lesser-known Fellini, or Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (an obscure western from 1954 that is incomprehensibly revered by all French true believers in the art of cinema). Most amazing of all is that these picture-houses are almost always packed, even on a sunny Monday afternoon in June (which is when I took the sample). For French film-buffs these are historic, even sacred sites. Hollywood may be the capital of the film world, but no one takes their movies more seriously than Parisians.

Nowhere is this more true than in the cafe of the Cinéma du Panthéon, one of the most important temples for Parisian cinéphiles. Appropriately enough, this is where I meet up with the film director Claire Denis. For the past decade or so, Denis has regularly been hailed as one of the leading French directors of her generation. This is mainly because, as her track record demonstrates, she is fearless. She does not shy away from difficult subjects – including sex, cannibalism, incest, politics, murder, race, sometimes all of them at the same time. It is this bravery that has inspired many critics to hail her as not only one of the most technically accomplished directors of recent years, but also as one of the leading chroniclers of 21st-century France in all its postcolonial complexity. She has even recently been mooted by at least one serious critic as "one of the greatest film-makers working today".

Our meeting is to discuss her latest movie, White Material – a fairly big-budget production starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert, which has just opened in the UK. The cafe is packed with young people drinking coffee and discussing, with touching Gallic intensity, film theory, Marxism and Jean-Luc Godard (his latest film has just been screened in the neighbouring cinema). Claire Denis is amused by this spectacle and sympathetic to it but insists that this is really not her world. "I am not an intellectual like these youngsters," she says, looking around. "I never was. I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person."

This much is obviously untrue. The sheer range of Denis's accomplishments suggests that, at the very least, this is a woman who thinks a lot about the world and her place in it. She married at 19, got divorced and has no children. Her early film career, when she worked as an assistant on film sets, was partly financed by her husband's money. Apart from this, she gives little away about her personal life and cultivates an austere public image. In photographs she is often gaunt and severe-looking, a look which has led to speculation over her sexuality. In the flesh, however, at 62 years old, she dresses sexily in a mini-skirt, black tights and leather boots, though her face is stern, at least for now. At first sight she is a mildly intimidating cross between Barbara Windsor and Simone de Beauvoir.

Denis first came to international prominence in 1988 with the film Chocolat, the story of a little French girl growing up in a remote colonial outpost in central Africa. The focus of the tale is on the little girl's complicated friendship with an older black servant. The film was praised as announcing a new maturity in French cinema, reflecting the complicated sexual and racial tensions at the core of the relations between the coloniser and the colonised. Chocolat was nominated for a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

Since then, Denis has made nine feature-length films that have established her as a key figure in world cinema. In some ways, Chocolat has been her most conventional work. Among the most critically acclaimed of her other films are S'en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a film about two Africans involved in cock-fighting, J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994), a study of a black serial killer adrift in Paris that was based on a notorious real-life case, Beau Travail (Good Work, 1999), a homoerotic reworking of Melville's Billy Budd set among foreign legionnaires in the Algerian desert, and 35 rhums (2008), a tale of working-class family life in multi-ethnic Paris. One of her most recent projects was L'intrus (The Intruder), a film about the heart transplant of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy was a friend of Jacques Derrida and is a sophisticated critic of Hegel and postmodernity, and hardly the kind of "ordinary person" that you might find in the films of Claire Denis.

When I ask Denis what brings together these disparate strands, her response is characteristically oblique:"I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life – how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties, or just to each other. I am curious about people. So that's why I do a lot of different things. The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me."

There is probably no such thing as a typical film by Claire Denis, but White Material is consistent with this vision of the role of cinema. It is set in an unnamed African country about to collapse into civil war. This is a blasted, haunted landscape, populated by demonic child soldiers and a shadowy guerrilla army that slaughters in the bush or under the cover of night. From the opening sequences on, everyone we meet, from the local mayor to farmers and shopkeepers, is visibly terrified.

Against this background Maria Vial, a French coffee farmer, struggles to save her crop as her workers abandon her in the weeks leading up to the harvest. This role is played with steely magnificence by Isabelle Huppert, who brings to it a combination of strength and fragility. Maria feels that she belongs in Africa because she works the land, but she is alone, vulnerable and white in a country where the majority population is black. This provides Denis with material for some brilliant visual motifs. Huppert is dressed in white for the early part of the film and always shot against a darkening background. Her almost translucent features are photographed in close-up as she sweats and suffers.

On its release in France White Material was lauded as another Denis masterpiece by the serious critics from Le Monde to Les Inrockuptibles. Not all reviewers have been sympathetic, however. White Material contains long stretches of images that have no apparent narrative purpose. This is a recurring device in Denis's films and one which, when overused, can frustrate the viewer and it is probably why, despite her star-studded cast, Denis has yet to cross over into the middle-brow middle ground occupied by most ordinary French cinema-goers.

The most potentially damaging review, however, appeared in the pages of the magazine Marianne, known for its provocative style. Film critic Danièle Heymann applauded Denis as both "artistically superb" and "politically incorrect". What exactly did this mean? Was she suggesting that Denis was perhaps using her white characters to demonstrate the moral superiority of the whites over the "savage" blacks in Africa in a situation of crisis? Did she even mean that Denis was defending the rights of the white farmers in present-day Zimbabwe?

"Of course not," Denis says now, "but I do know Africa. It was where I was brought up after all and I understand something of how different from Europe it is. It is always much more dense than people think. But sometimes things are literally black and white. So I wanted to show in this film how being white in Africa gives you a special status, almost a kind of magical aura. It protects you from misery and starvation. But although it can protect you, it is dangerous too. This is what Maria has to learn. The danger for Maria is that she thinks she belongs in Africa because she is close to the land and the people. She cannot return to France because she thinks that it will weaken her. But she learns that she doesn't belong in Africa as much as she thinks. For many white people in Africa this is the reality."

Denis has stated publicly that she is an admirer of Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who detested French colonialism and worked for the Algerian side until his death in 1961. In his key books Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon argued that colonialism was a form of psychic violence that destroyed the identity of the colonised. As a response to this, Fanon advocated total rejection of European civilisation. Instead, the colonised must create a new culture, defined by force of arms if necessary. He called this "the will to be a nigger".

Denis read Fanon when she was about 14 and found his ideas devastating. What she found most humbling in his work was his analysis of the degrading effect of the shame and humiliation, which infect coloniser and colonised alike. "I understood that humiliation was the important feeling that people had in this relationship," she says, "and this is on both sides, black and white."

Claire Denis was born in Paris but spent her childhood in Africa, where her father worked for the French colonial administration. The family moved house every two years, mainly through the French colonies that would become Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Djibouti. Unusually for the 1950s, her father spoke several African languages and was in favour of independence for African nations. He was a personal friend of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, an intellectual and the first president of Ivory Coast. Denis loved Africa, felt it was home, and was traumatised when, at the age of 13, she and her sister were forced to go back to Paris, having contracted polio. She returned, aged 17, to finish her school studies in Senegal, but something had been broken.

What this childhood gave her above all, Denis tells me, was a sense of wonder. "When I came back to France I realised that I had seen things that other children had not seen – elephants, zebras, deserts. What other children dreamed about, I had actually seen with my own eyes." When Denis moved back to Paris in the late 1960s to pick up her formal studies she says that she never lost the memory of this hallucinatory landscape. She graduated in 1972 from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), the prestigious film institute in Paris. She then went on to work as an assistant with Jacques Rivette, Costa-Gavras, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. "This is when I really fell in love with cinema," she says. "I began to love the whole process of organising the technology, the actors, and the team. For me, it is a total experience of art in action."

Denis co-wrote the script of White Material with Marie NDiaye, a 43-year-old novelist of Franco-Senegalese origin. NDiaye had her first novel published at the age of 17 and, in 2001, was awarded the Prix Femina for her novel Rosie Carpe. In 2009, she won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary prize in France, for her novel Trois puissantes femmes (Three Powerful Women). Given NDiaye's parallel interest in the French colonial experience and its aftermath, as well as her taste for novelty and experiment, this seemed the perfect artistic marriage. There were, however, rumours in the French press that all had not gone as well as it might have done. NDiaye has a reputation as a prickly character and Denis is not exactly known for her easy-going manner. Was there truth in the rumours of a clash of egos?

"Well, that is not exactly what happened," says Denis. "But there were circumstances at the beginning of our relationship that we had to sort out. Marie is a writer and she is used to spending a lot of time on her own, but I always work with people and when I do that I have to spend time with them – a lot of time walking, swimming, eating, talking, living with them. I know that Marie found this difficult at first. She was used to working and thinking without a partner. But we travelled together to Africa and that's when the work came together. I had an African childhood, which Marie did not have, and we discussed that, and what it meant to be white in Africa, and it was from that contradiction that we began to put together White Material."

Denis is impatient with the notion that Chocolat or White Material are autobiographical or even related as films. "No, White Material is not related to Chocolat," she says firmly. "There is no connection at all. They are entirely different visions of Africa and the cinema. Chocolat is about friendship and family, and maybe sex and longing, and White Material is about remaining strong in the face of danger."

I wonder whether the theme of White Material is in any sense linked to Marguerite Duras's novel Un Barrage contre le Paficique (published in 1950 and translated into English as The Sea Wall). This is a part-autobiographical novel in which Duras recounts part of her adolescence growing up in French Indochina, and partly a study of French colonialism. It is interesting that this book has twice been made into a film in French – most recently in 2008, starring none other than Isabelle Huppert in a role not unlike the character she plays in White Material.

Denis softens at this. "Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence. We had a lot in common in our backgrounds. But you have to remember, too, that French colonialism was not just the same experience all over the world. In Algeria the pieds noirs [French settlers] thought that they actually lived in a country called French Algeria and that this was their homeland, even if it was only a fantasy. For people like Marguerite and me, in Indochina or black Africa, we grew up somehow with the sense that we didn't belong, that we were outsiders. So, yes, there are things about that way of growing up that never leave you. There is a sense of marginality perhaps. That is definitely so."

I also wonder whether Denis's film-making technique owed anything to Duras's literary methods. In the 1950s and 1960s Duras was an avatar of the literary movement called the "nouveau roman". This was a way of building a narrative that leaves out all essential elements – plotting, psychology, narrative twists – leaving only the core inner experience of the central characters as the real texture of the book. This can sometimes be pretentious and deeply tedious, which is why the novels of leading "nouveaux romanciers" such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Sarraute now seem so dated. But in the hands of a skilled artist such as Duras the technique has a strange, compelling power, especially when she dealt in subjective experiences such as eroticism, grief, terror or joy.

"It is true that I have taken something from Duras, as a writer and as a woman," Denis says. "I grew up mainly reading detective novels and the usual classics at school. But I do admire Duras's novels, and particularly the way that she leaves crucial details out of the book so you are always guessing at the meaning. I have also read Georges Bataille, who was a friend of Duras and a good philosopher, and he talks about life in this way. It is a way of describing how we really live. We are always trying and failing to understand the world and ourselves. We never really know the final meaning of our lives. Literature and the cinema should reflect that."

For all her avowed interest in the drama of humanity, Denis is vague to the point of opacity about her own family life. But as I probe her relationship with her parents, she makes the most self-revealing comment in our conversation, remarking that for her cinema should be like her dreams. So what does she dream of? "I dream about a lot of things. I worry about the normal things that a person worries about – my parents are old and my father is ill. My mother is tough but he is not. I worry about my own health, the health of the people I love. I am a human being and my dreams are about all of these things, not always good, not always bad."

This is key to understanding the mysteries of the cinema of Claire Denis. She is fascinated by the intimacy and frailty of human relations, and tries not to categorise or define those experiences. She is drawn to extremes of experience – violence is a key motif, but so are betrayal and troubled sexuality. This tendency has led her to make mistakes. Perhaps her most disastrous error was the 2001 film Trouble Every Day, starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle. Its ludicrous plot about sex-hungry cannibalistic vampires in Paris drew derisive laughter when it was screened in Cannes and its gory scenes had even hardened horror fans retching in disgust. Denis found herself briefly bracketed with the "new French extremity" wave of films, fashionable in the late 1990s for depicting sex and death with pornographic relish. "Extreme" directors included the likes of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat and Bertrand Bonello, who all claimed to be extending the boundaries of the cinema by outdoing one another in nastiness.

That is not where Claire Denis belonged at all. At this distance the best we could agree about Trouble Every Day is that the sly and moody soundtrack by British band Tindersticks is superb. Denis has a longstanding association with Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples and the band have provided several soundtracks to her films, including White Material.

At its best, however, her work is truly "prismatic". That is a word, often overused by cinema critics, to describe work that is dreamy, elliptical and apparently disconnected from real life. Denis's approach is to take on reality from a variety of angles – she refracts real experience with a cinematic method that always seeks to conceal more than it reveals. In this way, as seen in the dream-like, terrible landscapes of White Material, she can literally open up a new field of vision.

This approach was not part of her ambition when she started making pictures, she says now. "I always wanted to make an epic. I love epic adventures as I have always loved travelling. An epic adventure takes you on a journey to a place that you have never been before. That is why I love the cinema of David Lean. When you went to see Ryan's Daughter or Lawrence of Arabia, he took you on a journey, and you never knew quite where it was going, or what it was all going to mean. That kind of cinema is gone now. The technology has changed. The digital era also means that the money has gone. But it is a proud ambition for a film-maker to have, to take the viewer somewhere new."

So does this mean that for all her reputation as a difficult and tricky film-maker, she also has a simpler aim: to entertain? "The cinema gives pleasure, certainly. But most of all for me, film-making is a journey into the impossible. When I make a film I have to be like a military commander, in charge of every strategy and tactic, but I never really know where we are going."

At this point she leans across to me, and she finally has a warm if secretive smile. "But of course," she says, "I can never let anyone know this."

Andrew Hussey

Estrenos: crítica de "Stella", de Sylvie Verheyde (Clarín)

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Ciclo de cine francés: Les Avants Premieres (Clarín)

Desde el jueves 18 y hasta el miércoles 24 tendrá lugar en el Patio Bullrich la segunda edición del ciclo "Les avant premieres", dedicado a preestrenos de cine francés, que esta vez contará con títulos de grandes realizadores como Agnes Varda, Francois Ozon, Rachid Bouchareb, Christophe Honoré y Xavier Giannoli, además de un homenaje al recientemente fallecido Eric Rohmer.

Del prolífico Ozon, el realizador de Ocho mujeres y La piscina, se verá Ricky, con Sergi Lopez, quien vendrá a presentar el filme. Mezclando realismo y fantasía, Ricky cuenta la historia de una pareja que tiene un bebé bastante particular.

De Varda, la veterana realizadora de Cleo de 5 a 7 se verá su documental Las playas de Agnes, otro de esos encantadores diarios personales en los que repasa, camarita en mano, su vida personal y su carrera profesional.

El también prolífico Honoré trae la encantadora Canciones de amor, historias de un grupo de parisinos (Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Chiara Mastroianni) metidos en complejas y dolorosas historias de amor, pero todo sazonado con canciones pop y números musicales.

El filme de Honoré compitió en Cannes, lo mismo que La mentira, de Xavier Giannoli, un drama sobre un ex convicto, en el que trabajan Francois Cluzet, Emanuelle Devos y Gérard Depardieu.

De Bouchareb se verá London River, que compitió en el Festival de Berlín en 2009. El filme, con Brenda Blethyn, se centra en la relación entre dos personas (una mujer inglesa y un africano musulmán) que buscan a sus hijos, quienes pueden haber sido afectados por los atentados en Londres del 2005.

Dernier maquis, por su parte, es un intenso drama de Rabah Ameur-Zaiméche que hace centro en las dificultades sociales, políticas y religiosas de un grupo de inmigrantes, también de origen musulmán, en una fábrica francesa. La premiada Seraphine, de Martin Provost, es una biografía de la excéntrica pintora Seraphine de Senlis, con una gran actuación de Yolande Moreau.

Una de las grandes revelaciones de los últimos años, que se verá en el ciclo, es El padre de mis hijos, el drama de Mia Hansen-love, centrado en la vida profesional y familiar de un productor de cine cuyo negocio entra en crisis. También se verá la comedia Dos en uno, sobre un cantante que muere y reencarna en el cuerpo del ejecutivo de una multinacional, con la participación de las superestrellas Daniel Auteuil y Alain Chabat.

Stella, de Sylvie Verheyde, la historia de una preadolescente y sus problemas de adaptación familiar y escolar, y El erizo, de Mona Achache, con Josiane Balasko, completan la programación. Las entradas ya están a la venta, a 12 pesos, en el Patio Bullrich, Avenida del Libertador 750. La información sobre días y horarios está en www.cine-frances.com.

Información

En homenaje al gran cineasta francés Eric Rohmer, que falleció el 11 de enero a los 89 años, se proyectará una de sus mejores películas: "La rodilla de Clara", de 1970, con Jean-Claude Brialy y Beatrice Rénaud. Se verá el jueves a las 12.10, el lunes 22 a las 14.30 y 19.40, y el martes 23, a las 15.30.

Universciné, en la Alianza Francesa

La Alianza Francesa presenta una nueva edición de este ciclo, que acerca al público argentino películas indepedientes europeas que fueron bien recibidas por el público y la crítica del viejo continente. En esta ocasión, podrán verse nueve filmes -en su mayoría procedentes de Francia y Bélgica-, entre los que se destaca la trilogía de Lucas Belvaux, donde en cada película pone el foco en un personaje diferente de la misma historia.

Del martes 1 de septiembre al miércoles 28 de octubre

Alianza Francesa: Córdoba 946, 1ºpiso

Informes: 4322-0068

Programación

MARTES 1 DE SEPTIEMBRE, 20HS

Después de la vida

Dir.: Lucas Belvaux

Francia, Bélgica, 2003, 2h03

Drama

Pascal es un policía de Grenoble, casado con Agnès, profesora y adicta a la morfina, y se sirve de sus contactos para conseguirle la droga. La persona que se la suministra quiere que Pascal atrape a un terrorista que acaba de fugarse de la prisión, y deja de facilitarle la sustancia hasta que lo consiga. Entretanto, una amiga de Agnès, le pide que vigile a su marido porque cree que le está siendo infiel. Pascal, cansado de ser un instrumento al servicio de la adicción de su mujer, se enamora de otra mujer y Agnès se las ingenia para conseguir la droga por su cuenta.

MIERCOLES 9 DE SEPTIEMBRE, 20HS

Escapando

Dir. : Lucas Belvaux

Francia, Bélgica, 2003, 1h51

Thriller

Bruno se ha fugado de la prisión y deambula por las calles de Grenoble con el propósito de saldar cuentas pendientes tras quince años de encierro por un acto de terrorismo. Mientras sufre la tenaz persecución de Pascal, un policía que tiene serios problemas personales, Bruno se da cuenta de que las causas y los viejos métodos de lucha ya no sirven. Tras descubrir que su antigua amante se casó y abandonó la organización, Bruno busca refugio en una residencia de vacaciones.

MARTES 15 DE SEPTIEMBRE, 20HS

La pareja perfecta

Dir.: Lucas Belvaux

Francia, Bélgica, 1h37

Comedia

Un matrimonio entra en crisis tras veinte años de feliz convivencia. Cecile es una hermosa maestra que está profundamente enamorada de su marido Alain, un hipocondríaco que está convencido de que va a morir. El no quiere alarmar a su mujer, quién confunde su extraño comportamiento con una infidelidad. Cécile pide ayuda a Pascal, el marido de su amiga Agnes, que es policía, para que siga a su marido en sus movimientos.

MARTES 22 DE SEPTIEMBRE, 20HS

El mundo vivo

Dir.: Eugène Green

Francia, Bélgica, 2003, 1h15

Drama

Fábula de un ogro que repudia a su mujer por cocinar platos vegetarianos para casarse con una princesa que mantiene cautiva en una capilla. Mientras dos niños esperan su turno para ser devorados por el ogro, dos caballeros parten por dos rutas distintas a combatirlo.

MARTES 29 DE SEPTIEMBRE, 20HS

¿Por qué (no) Brasil?

Dir: Laetitia Masson

Francia, 2004, 1h32

Drama

Nos cuenta el caso de una cineasta que pasa por un mal momento y que piensa que lo más bajo para una directora es dejarse llevar por la facilidad de adaptar un libro y lo más abyecto de todo, intentar adaptar un "buen" libro. Su nombre: Laetitia Masson.

Por triste que parezca, lo cierto es que el único productor dispuesto a darle trabajo le propone lo peor de lo peor: adaptar el libro más difícil de adaptar por ser él de un escritor de verdad: contemporáneo (por si fuera poco) y amigo(a) (para enredarlo más).

La cineasta no tiene más solución. Necesita dinero, le gusta el libro, quiere a su amiga y el productor le gusta. Se llama Maurice Rey.

Y ahí se lanza a adaptar el libro: escritura, producción, casting. La adaptación comienza a tornársele imposible. Pero cuanto más lo piensa, mas va penetrando el libro en su vida hasta que, poco a poco, el libro empieza a adaptarla a ella.

MARTES 6 DE OCTUBRE, 20HS

El sol asesinado

Dir.: Abdelkrim Bahloul

Argelia, Bélgica, Francia, Tunisia, 2004, 2hs

Drama

El poeta Jean Senac es un "pied noir" de los que decidió quedarse en Argelia en 1962 -año de la independencia del país. Diez años después, hace emisiones para la radio y se encuentra bajo vigilancia policial. Sus recitales de poesía gozan de gran éxito popular en todo el país y su emisión "Poesía en todos los frentes" gusta mucho a los jóvenes.

Así pues, cuando los dos estudiantes Hamid y Belkacem se enteran de que su obra escrita y presentada en el Festival Nacional de Teatro Argelino ha sido eliminada so pretexto de haberla representado en francés se consuelan con la visita entre bastidores de Jean Senac que viene a felicitarles.

Hamid y Belkacem se harán amigos íntimos del poeta y serán testigos de toda su lucha en pro de la libertad y cultura de la juventud argelina.

Una lucha que le conducirá hasta el martirio: morirá asesinado en la bodega donde vivía, una noche de agosto de 1973. Asesinato del que se acusará a Hamid…

MARTES 14 DE OCTUBRE, 20HS

Stormy Weather

Dir.: Solveig Anspach

Bélgica, Francia, 2003, 1h33

Drama

Cora, una joven psiquiatra, trata a una joven que se niega a hablar y cuya identidad se desconoce. Se encariña y acaban teniendo con ella una relación que no se ciñe al marco terapéutico tradicional. Un día, Cora se entera de que su paciente ha sido identificada: se llama Loa, es extranjera y se le ha devuelto a su país, Islandia. Cora decide ir a buscarla para proseguir el tratamiento con ella.

MARTES 20 DE OCTUBRE, 20HS

Clara y yo

Dir.: Arnaud Viard

Francia, 2004, 1h 26

Drama

Antoine, a sus 33 años sigue siendo un idealista insatisfecho que espera encontrar el gran amor de su vida. La naturalidad y ligereza con las que en apariencia se maneja por París, ahora ya, dejan traslucir su soledad.

Pero, un buen día, Antoine conoce a Clara: guapa libre, abierta, sabiendo pasar de lo grave a lo frívolo con tal encanto que Antoine queda inmediatamente prendado. Están hechos el uno para el otro y ninguno de los dos lo había sentido así antes.

Pero la vida no es cosa fácil y les va a tocar afrontar pruebas a las que no están preparados.

MIERCOLES 28 DE OCTUBRE, 20HS

El vientre de Juliette

Dir.: Martin Provost

España, Francia, Luxemburgo, 2003, 1h32

Juliette tiene 20 años. Se queda embarazada y Mathias, el padre, se siente demasiado joven para asumir un hijo. Juliette decide tener el bebé caiga quien caiga... No sólo está en contra Mathias sino también su madre, Julia, ex niña prodigio neurótica y cleptómana que quiere a su hija para ella sola.

También está la hermana mayor de Juliette y un poco su segunda madre que quiere quedarse con el niño y encontrarle un marido como Dios manda...

Y el padre fantasma, ese padre que Juliette nunca conoció, que abandonó a su hija nada más nacer.

"36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup", de Jacques Rivette (fotos)

Avec Jane Birkin, Sergio Castellito

Cine francés inédito

Hoy comienza en la Sala Lugones del Teatro San Martín un interesante ciclo de operas primas francesas en el que se darán seis filmes de ese país inéditos en la Argentina. Se verán copias nuevas en 35mm. con sonido Dolby Stereo, enviadas especialmente desde París por el Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de Francia.

El ciclo empieza con 13m2, de Barthélémy Grossmann (2007), un policial centrado en tres asaltantes que deben esconderse tras robar un camión blindado, que se verá a las 14.30 y a las 19.30. A las 17 y a las 22, se exhibirá Entre las cuerdas, de Magaly Richard-Serrano (2007), con Richard Anconina y Maria De Medeiros, centrado en una familia que posee un club de boxeo.

Mañana será el turno de La cabeza de mamá, filme de Carine Tardieu (2006), protagonizado por Karin Viard y Jane Birkin, centrado en una adolescente que busca a una ex pareja de su madre. El martes se exhibirá Nacimiento de las pulpos, de Céline Sciamma (2007), sobre tres chicas adolescentes que comparten unas verano. El filme ganó el prestigioso Prix Louis Delluc a la mejor opera prima.

Miércoles y jueves se verán los títulos más reconocidos de este programa. Primero será el turno de Todo se perdona, de Mia HansenÅLove, acerca de una familia atravesando una fuerte crisis. El cierre del ciclo será con Capitaine Achab (2007), versión libre de Moby Dick que dirigió Philippe Ramos, con Denis Lavant y Lou Castel.

Entre el viernes y el domingo se verán repeticiones de los títulos anunciados. El martes, al concluir este ciclo, comenzará Encuentro con el cine coreano, integrado por diez largometrajes, en su mayoría inéditos en la Argentina, que incluye dos filmes clásicos (de los años '60 y '80) y ocho títulos de la más reciente producción de Corea del Sur, representativos de las diversas tendencias del cine de ese país.

Agnès Varda: Living for Cinema, and Through It (The New York Times)

By A. O. SCOTT

IS there something about France — the diet, perhaps, or the health-care system — that accounts for the extraordinary creative longevity of so many of its filmmakers? A half-century after the New Wave crested and crashed ashore, a remarkable number of directors associated with that movement are still making movies. Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol are approaching 80, and while Mr. Godard appears to have slowed his pace a bit, Mr. Chabrol continues to produce sinister, elegant studies of passion and power at the rate of about one a year. Jacques Rivette, 81, and Eric Rohmer, who turned 89 this year, recently have made ambitious and well-regarded films, and Alain Resnais, now 87, was seen in Cannes last month flouting the red-carpet dress code, collecting a lifetime-achievement award and presenting his latest movie.

And then there is Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.

There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.

The film includes an abundance of clips from her other films, and photographs capturing various journeys, projects and relationships, but it is less an archival exhibition than a wonder cabinet, full of whimsical inventions as well as recovered artifacts. The filmmaker Chris Marker, Ms. Varda’s “interlocutor,” appears in the guise of an orange cartoon cat with a digitally altered voice. There are dreamy montages, re-enactments and surrealist set pieces that demonstrate her continued interest in installation art and photography as well as film. The theme of the movie is beaches, and since Paris, where Ms. Varda has spent much of her working life, has none, she filled a street with sand and took the staff of her production company outside to sit at their desks in bathing suits.

The film sustains an unusual blend of gravity and playfulness, a mood at once ripe with experience and childlike in its capacity for wonder. “At one screening,” Ms. Varda said, “there was a young man, maybe 22-years-old, who said about this film: ‘It gives you the desire to grow old.’ ”

Ms. Varda has something of a complicated history with the question of age. When she was barely 30, a photo caption in a French magazine labeled her “an ancestor of the New Wave.” The title was bestowed in recognition of her first (and, at the time, her only) feature film, “La Pointe Courte,” whose modest means and restless aesthetic and intellectual ambitions anticipated the breakout films of François Truffaut, Mr. Godard and the rest by a good half-decade. “I thought, well, now that I am an ancestor, I don’t have to grow any older,” Ms. Varda has said, and the elfin, energetic figure she presents in her recent documentaries and in person is decidedly youthful, much as the unlined face that stares from the pages of the old Nouvelle Vague yearbook seems preternaturally wise.

As the sole woman in that charmed circle of young lions, Ms. Varda has taken on more than her share of symbolic roles: mother, sister, confidante, colleague and — literally in the case of Jacques Demy, a fellow director and her husband from 1962 until his death in 1990 — wife. Appearing on screen, in “Beaches” and “The Gleaners and I,” surrounded by much younger crew members and performers, she is an almost ideally grandmotherly presence, pre-empting the indignities of age with a self-mockery that subtracts nothing from her rigorous and skeptical intelligence.

A grandmother who, in telling stories about the old days, is more apt to charm — or even shock — the kids than to bore them. “Many young people love me,” she said, smiling at the forthrightness of the declaration. “Some of them call me Mamie Punk” — Granny Punk — “maybe because of the hair.” At the time her coiffure was a violet fringe surmounted by a tonsure of gray, a Rothkoesque variation on the Dutch Boy she wears, impervious to changes in style, in every era covered by “The Beaches of Agnès.”

But the nickname also acknowledges a key aspect of Ms. Varda’s personal and artistic style. Not quite the aggressive, nihilistic stance associated with punk rock, perhaps, but rather a kind of thrifty, skeptical anarchism of the spirit, a liberating willingness to find inspiration and even beauty in what might conventionally be dismissed as rough, ugly or commonplace.

“La Pointe Courte,” that great ancestral text, exemplifies this attitude, and affirms Ms. Varda’s position at the vanguard not only of the New Wave, but also of any filmmaking tendency worthy of the name independent. French cinema in 1954 was male dominated, hierarchical and rigidly bureaucratic, governed by an elaborate set of rules and protocols. An aspiring director was expected to jump through carefully placed and managed hoops of training, apprenticeship and credentialization. The idea that anyone could pick up a camera, gather a crew and just start shooting a film — it just was not done.

But that is just what Ms. Varda did. Trained as a photographer, she was, as she puts it now, almost entirely “innocent of cinema.” Unlike her soon-to-be confreres in the New Wave, who emerged from the hothouses of the Paris Cinémathèque and Cahiers du Cinéma, she was neither a critic nor even much of a film buff, having seen only a handful of movies when she decided to make her own. “I thought that pictures plus words, that was cinema,” she says at one point in an interview included on the Criterion DVD of “La Pointe Courte.” “It was only later that I discovered it was something else.”

“La Pointe Courte,” however, is anything but a naïve, literal-minded photographer’s foray into moviemaking. Its structure was suggested by “The Wild Palms,” William Faulkner’s novel composed of parallel stories told in alternating chapters. One thread of Ms. Varda’s film follows a married couple, played by Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret (in his first film role), as they discuss the ambiguous state of their love. Should they separate or not, and if so why? They pose these questions — and pose in striking, quasi-Cubist close-ups and de Chiricoesque wide compositions — in the alleys and streets of Sète, the Mediterranean port town whose working-class residents supply the other half of the narrative. These fishermen and their families, more or less playing themselves, grapple with death, work, marriage and the intrusions of health inspectors and other annoying agents of the state.

The contrast between the two halves of “La Pointe Courte” is characteristic of the tensions and complexities that flicker through nearly all of Ms. Varda’s feature films. Documentary flows into artifice, abstraction gives way to naturalism, and cinema is revealed to consist of the collision, be it serendipitous or unsettling, between the found and the made. The two “plots” converge at a jousting tournament in which local men perched on platforms atop elaborately decorated galleylike boats try to knock each other into the water with long poles. The jousting sequence collapses the distinction between documentary and performance in what might be described as a characteristically Vardaesque fashion. If this curious and ancient ritual did not exist, she might have invented it.

One of the dividends of “The Beaches of Agnès” is that Ms. Varda allows herself, and the audience, to peek behind the scenes, to learn something about her techniques and the sources of her inspiration. Some of these have been personal and geographical: Sète, so vivid in “La Pointe Courte,” was where her family took refuge during World War II after fleeing Belgium. Others are literary, artistic and political: the Surrealists, Picasso, the revolutions in China and Cuba and, above all, the rise of feminism in the West.

She pauses to point out some of the motifs and formal choices in her work: the clocks that mark the minutes in “Cléo From 5 to 7,” her 1962 real-time tour de force that follows a ravishing, anxious blonde through the silvery streets of Paris; the right-to-left tracking shots that link the vignettes in “Vagabond”; the re-enactments of scenes from Demy’s films in “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991), her loving portrait of her husband as a young man.

These movies confound easy description. (Four of the best and best known — “La Pointe Courte,” “Cléo,” “La Bonheur” and “Vagabond” — are available in an indispensable Criterion boxed set.) And Ms. Varda counts only “Vagabond,” in which Sandrine Bonnaire is heartbreaking and abrasive as a young woman adrift, as an unqualified success. It won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1985, a prize that, in “Beaches,” is placed in the sand of her homemade Parisian lido alongside Demy’s Palme d’Or for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964). Not that she is disappointed. “I am the queen of the margins,” she said. “But the films are loved. The films are remembered. And this is my aim — to be loved as a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker.”

It is a pleasure she shared for nearly 30 years with Demy, who haunts “The Beaches of Agnès” like a benevolent, enigmatic ghost. “The dearest of the dead,” she calls him, and the great love of her life. Their artistic sensibilities were not closely aligned — his stated ambition was to make “calm films, films about happiness” while her work bristles with a sense of contradiction — and the intimate details of their lives together, and of his illness and death at 59, are addressed with brevity and circumspection. The tone of the film is personal, but not confessional. It is more of an essay in memory than a memoir.

And, as such, it is about the way memory intrudes into and colors the present-tense flow of experience, much as Ms. Varda’s cinema flows into the stream of everyday life. “Do I dream, or do I see a picture of Jacques Demy?” she asked at one point in our interview, which took place at the offices of Film Forum, in a room full of film stills and framed photographs of directors and stars. The one that caught her attention was at eye level, on the other side of the room. Had it been placed there on purpose, we wondered, like the tokens and talismans that find their way onto her beaches and into the frames of her films? It was, to use one of her favorite words, a puzzle. Solving it diffused some of the mystery — the picture, on closer inspection, was not of Demy after all — but did not dispel the curiosity that drives Ms. Varda to pause over details, impressions and moments. “I wonder who it is?” she said.

Les Avant-Premières, desde hoy en el Patio Bullrich

Les Avant-Premières, es un ciclo de cine francés que se va a realizar desde el jueves 19 al miércoles 25 de marzo. Se presentarán las mejores películas francesas a estrenarse durante el 2009, y tres reposiciones de filmes ya estrenados.

Las entradas tienen un valor de $10, y para adquirirlas hay que ir a los Cines del Patio Bullrich. Para cualquier duda, y saber de que trata cada filme dirigirse a la web oficial del evento greentaraproducciones.com/cine/.

Películas que se van a proyectar: Entre los muros, Actrices, Rumba, Los testigos, El silencio de Lorna, Por fin viuda, La canción de París,
Belle toujours, Jardines en otoño, La culpa es de Fidel, La historia de un amor y El invitado.

A continuación la programación completa de Les Avant-Premières.

19 al 25 de marzo de 2009:

Jueves 19
12.30 La canción de París, de Christophe Barratier
15.00 La historia de un amor, de Thierry Klifa
17.15 Actrices, de Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
19.30 La canción de París, de Christophe Barratier
22.00 Entre los Muros, de Laurent Cantet

Viernes 20
12.30 Por fin viuda, de Isabelle Mergault
14.30 Actrices, de Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
16.30 Por fin viuda, de Isabelle Mergault
18.30 Actrices, de Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
20.30 Por fin viuda, de Isabelle Mergault
22.20 Entre los Muros, de Laurent Cantet

Sábado 21
12.30 Rumba, de Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon y Bruno Romy
14.30 El silencio de Lorna, de Jean-Pierre Dardenne y Luc Dardenne (FOTO)
16.30 Los testigos, de André Téchiné
18.40 Rumba, de Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon y Bruno Romy
20.15 Los testigos, de André Téchiné
22.20 Entre los Muros, de Laurent Cantet

Domingo 22
12.30 Los testigos, de André Téchiné
14.40 La culpa es de Fidel, de Julie Gavras
16.30 El silencio de Lorna, de Jean-Pierre Dardenne y Luc Dardenne
18.30 La historia de un amor, de Thierry Klifa
20.30 La culpa es de Fidel, de Julie Gavras

Lunes 23
12.30 La historia de un amor, de Thierry Klifa
14.30 El invitado, de Laurent Bouhnik
16.30 Belle Toujours, de Manoel de Oliveira
18.30 Jardines en otoño,de Otar Iosseliani
21.00 Belle Toujours, de Manoel de Oliveira
22.30 Jardines en otoño,de Otar Iosseliani

Martes 24
12.30 Belle Toujours,de Manoel de Oliveira
14.30 La culpa es de Fidel, de Julie Gavras
16.30 El invitado, de Laurent Bouhnik
18.30 La historia de un amor, de Thierry Klifa
20.30 Belle Toujours, de Manoel de Oliveira
21.30 Los testigos, de André Téchiné

Miércoles 25
12.30 Jardines en otoño, de Otar Iosseliani
15.00 El invitado, de Laurent Bouhnik
17.00 La historia de un amor,de Thierry Klifa
19.00 El invitado, de Laurent Bouhnik
21.00 Rumba, de Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon y Bruno Romy
22.30 El silencio de Lorna, de Jean-Pierre Dardenne y Luc Dardenne

Las nominaciones al César

The nominations in the main categories:

Best Film
The Class - Laurent Cantet
I’ve Loved You So Long - Philippe Claudel
Public Enemy Number One - Jean-François Richet (FOTO)
Paris - Cédric Klapisch
The First Day of the Rest of Your Life - Rémi Bezançon
Séraphine - Martin Provost
A Christmas Tale - Arnaud Desplechin

Best Actor
Vincent Cassel - Public Enemy Number One
François-Xavier Demaison - Coluche, l'histoire d'un mec
Guillaume Depardieu - Versailles
Albert Dupontel - Love Me No More
Jacques Gamblin - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Best Actress
Catherine Frot - Le crime est notre affaire
Yolande Moreau - Séraphine
Kristin Scott Thomas - I’ve Loved You So Long
Tilda Swinton - Julia
Sylvie Testud - Sagan

Best Director
Rémi Bezançon - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Laurent Cantet - The Class
Arnaud Desplechin - A Christmas Tale
Martin Provost - Séraphine
Jean-François Richet - Public Enemy Number One

Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Benjamin Biolay - Stella
Claude Rich - With a Little Help From Myself
Jean-Paul Roussillon - A Christmas Tale
Pierre Vaneck - Love Me No More
Roschdy Zem - The Girl from Monaco

Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Jeanne Balibar - Sagan
Anne Consigny - A Christmas Tale
Edith Scob - Summer Hours
Karin Viard - Paris
Elsa Zylberstein - I’ve Loved You So Long

Best Debut Film
Home - Ursula Meier
I’ve Loved You So Long - Philippe Claudel
Anything for Her - Fred Cavaye
Versailles - Pierre Schoeller

Best Documentary Film
Her Name Is Sabine - Sandrine Bonnaire
Hollywood, I’m Sleeping Over Tonight - Antoine de Maximy
The Beaches of Agnès - Agnès Varda
Tabarly - Pierre Marcel
Country Profiles: Modern Life - Raymond Depardon

Best Foreign Film
Eldorado - Bouli Lanners
Gomorrah - Matteo Garrone
Into the Wild - Sean Penn
Lorna’s Silence - Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
There Will be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson
Two Lovers - James Gray
Waltz With Bashir - Ari Folman

Best Male Newcomer
Ralph Amoussou - With a Little Help From Myself
Laurent Capelluto - A Christmas Tale
Marc-André Grondin - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet - La belle personne
Pio Marmai - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Best Female Newcomer
Marilou Berry - Vilaine
(“Nasty”) Louise Bourgoin - The Girl from Monaco
Anaïs Demoustier - Grown Ups
Déborah François - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Léa Seydoux - La belle personne

Best Original Screenplay
Marc Abdelnour & Martin Provost - Séraphine
Rémi Bezançon - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Dany Boon, Franck Magnier & Alexandre Charlot - Welcome to the Sticks
Philippe Claudel - I‘ve Loved You So Long
Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu - A Christmas Tale

Best Adapted Screenplay
Eric Assous, François d'Epenoux & Jean Becker - Love Me No More
Clémence de Biéville, François Caviglioli & Nathalie Lafaurie - Le crime est notre affaire
Laurent Cantet, François Begaudeau & Robin Campillo - The Class
Abdel Raouf Dafri & Jean-François Richet - Public Enemy Number One
Christophe Honoré & Gilles Taurand - La belle personne

Best Original Score
Jean-Louis Aubert - I’ve Loved You So Long
Marco Beltrami & Marcus Trumpp - Public Enemy Number One
Michael Galasso - Séraphine
Sinclair - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Reinhardt Wagner - Paris 36

Best Production Design
Thierry François - Séraphine
Emile Ghigo - Public Enemy Number One
Yvan Niclass - Home
Jean Rabasse - Paris 36
Olivier Raoux - The Children of Timpelbach

Best Cinematography
Laurent Brunet - Séraphine
Robert Gantz - Public Enemy Number One
Eric Gautier - A Christmas Tale
Agnès Godard - Home
Tom Stern - Paris 36

Best Editing
Laurence Briaud - A Christmas Tale
Robin Campillo & Stéphanie Léger - The Class
Sophie Reine - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Francine Sandberg - Paris
Hervé Schneid & Bill Pankow - Public Enemy Number One

Best Costume Design
Madeline Fontaine - Séraphine
Pierre-Jean Larroque - Female Agents
Virgine Montel - Public Enemy Number One
Nathalie du Roscoät - Sagan
Carine Sarfati - Paris 36

Best Sound
Jean-Pierre Laforce, Nicolas Cantin & Sylvain Malbrant - A Christmas Tale
Olivier Mauvezin, Agnès Ravez & Jean-Pierre Laforce - The Class
Jean Minondo, Gérard Hardy, Alexandre Widmer, Loïc Prian, François Groult & Hervé Buirette - Public Enemy Number One
Daniel Sobrino, Roman Dymny & Vincent Goujon - Paris 36
Philippe Vandendriessche, Emmanuel Croset & Ingrid Ralet - Séraphine

Best Short Film
Les miettes - Pierre Pinaud
Les paradis perdus - Hélier Cisterne
Skhizein - Jérémy Clapin
Taxi Wala - Lola Frederich
Une leçon particulière - Raphaël Chevènement

Universciné

CINE FRANCÉS PARA TODO EL MUNDO

El Ministerio Francés de Relaciones Exteriores desarrolló junto a la sociedad Le Meilleur Du Cinéma Français el sitio web Universciné. El mismo permite a su red cultural tener acceso a un amplio programa de películas francesas; y así organizar proyecciones en cualquier rincón del mundo. Para festejar el nacimiento de este proyecto -que se nutre de las nuevas tecnologías para abrir las puertas del cine francés a todo el planeta-, Universciné propone al público de la Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires un decálogo de películas subtituladas en castellano que representan lo mejor de la producción francesa de los últimos años. La programación incluye clásicos emblemáticos del cine contemporáneo y joyas menos difundidas. Historias ordinarias y extraordinarias, personajes atípicos, y comedias y dramas del amor podrán verse en este ciclo que celebra la originalidad , la diversidad y la riqueza del cine francés.

Fechas:
Lunes 30 de junio
Martes 1, lunes 7, martes 8, lunes 14, martes 15, lunes 21 y 28, martes 29 de julio
Lunes 4 y martes 5 de agosto
Horario: 20hs
Lugar: Alianza Francesa Buenos Aires, Córdoba 946
Informes: Tel: 4322 - 0068
Entrada Gratuita - Las Entradas se retiran 30 minutos antes de la función
+ info http://www.alianzafrancesa.org.ar/

Programación

LUNES 30 DE JUNIO
La Petite Lili Claude Miller. 2003; 1h 44mn (foto)
Adaptación cinematográfica de la obra teatral de Chéjov, La Gaviota. Lili , una joven actriz, deja a Julien, director en ciernes que tanto gusta a Jeanne-Marie, para rendirse en brazos de Brice, cineasta conocido quien, a su vez, deja a Mado, la actriz que tan fiel le ha sido.

MARTES 1 DE JULIO
Mariées mais pas trop Catherine Corsini. 2002; 1h 39mn
Con veinte años, Laurence siempre está dispuesta a enamorarse. Pero le pone tanto afán, que hace huir a sus pretendientes. Al morir su madre, se emperra en volver a ver a su abuela Renée, con la que no ha estado desde niña. Renée no muestra ningún entusiasmo al ver a su nieta. Su candidez le irrita profundamente. Quiere probarle que no existe el gran amor, que los hombres siempre decepcionan: para ello, le propone enseñarle su propio arte de vivir.
Ese arte consiste en una serie de reglas elementales: seducir a un rico, casarse con él lo antes posible, deshacerse de él cuanto antes, de manera discreta pero definitiva, cobrar su póliza de seguro de vida, y disfrutar de ella con gran egoísmo y… volver a empezar la operación.

Lunes 7 de julio
La bande du drugstore François Armanet, 2002; 1h30mn
En mitad de los años 60, los niños bonitos del Drugstore eran los que mejor iban vestidos y los más radicales de una generación que sólo creía en sí misma y pensaba estar creando todo de la nada. (falta texto).Ligues, putas, juergas, timos, gamberradas, discotecas....

Martes 8 de julio
Les fautes d’orthographe Jean-Jacques Zilbermann, 2003; 1h30 mn
Daniel Massu de 15 años, está aterrado por la idea de vivir en el internado, cuyo director es su padre. Pero en ese universo nuevo, va a descubrir las relaciones prohibidas y la rebelión...

LUNES 14 DE JULIO
Salut Cousin! (Merzak Allouache. 1996; 1h20min)
Un joven argelino llega a París, donde vive su primo desde hace tiempo. Le han dicho que esa es la tierra prometida y que allí podrá hacer dinero fácil. Pero descubrirá que las cosas no son tan fàciles.

MARTES 15 DE JULIO
Le tango des Rashevski (Sam Garbarski. 2003; 1h37min)
La abuela Rosa ha muerto. Odiaba la religión y a los rabinos; y sin embargo se había reservado una sepultura en el recinto judío del cementerio. Los Rashevski no saben qué pensar. De pronto se les plantean problemas insólitos y no logran ponerse de acuerdo. ¿Cómo enterrarla? Cada uno se lanza a su propia aventura personal como si sus vidas no fueran, de por sí, lo bastante complicadas. Menos mal que existe el tango…

LUNES 21 DE JULIO
Ma caméra et moi (Christophe Loizillon. 2001; 1h 30mn)
Max tiene una obsesión en su vida: filmar a Dios y a las chicas.
A los seis años intenta filmar el sexo de una compañera. Más tarde, a una pareja de turistas japoneses. A la tercera, seduce a la vendedora que finalmente acepta desnudarse. Cuando piensa que su vida es desagradable, pierde la cabeza y se va al campo, a descansar. Las mujeres le tienen aburrido y Dios no da señales de vida…

LUNES 28 DE JULIO
La naissance de l’amour (Philippe Gardel. 1993; 1h34min)
Paul vive con su mujer embarazada y su hijo adolescente. Tiene una amante, Ulrika, de la que está enamorado y por la que sería capaz de abandonar su hogar. Pero Ulrika no le corresponde. A su amigo Marcus, tampoco le van bien las cosas. Acaba de ser abandonado por su compañera, que se marchó a Roma con otro hombre.

MARTES 29 DE JULIO
Aaltra (Benoît Delépine, Gustave de Kervern. 2004; 1h32)
Dos vecinos que se odian y que son atropellados durante una discusión. Ambos salen de la clínica en silla de ruedas. Cada uno decide hacer un viaje personal y abandonan la idea de suicidarse, pero el destino de ambos les vuele a unir en una estación de tren. Comienzan una odisea imprevisible, pero esta vez juntos: obtener una compensación económica por parte de los responsables de su accidente.

LUNES 4 DE AGOSTO
A la vie à la mort (Robert Guediguian. 1995; 1h45)
Josepha, a pesar de su edad, sigue haciendo strip-tease en un cabaret de mala muerte frente a un público escaso: Jaco, abandonado por su mujer, Patrick que no puede darle un hijo a Marie-Sol, y Vénus, una joven adicta.

MARTES 5 DE AGOSTO
Mon père est ingenieur (Robert Guediguian. 2004; 1h30min)
La historia de un hombre y de una mujer que desde niños no pueden vivir el uno sin el otro. Ambos son médicos; y sus respectivas carreras amenazan con separarles. Contra toda probabilidad, escogen enfrentarse al destino y a la realidad para quedarse juntos.