La Vie

On a Saturday evening in Paris, Juliette, Héloïse and Marianne each get their first separate experience of "Parisian life".

A repetitious experiment made with a found footage-sequence. The image, showing a group of schoolchildren mounting a stairway, is blurred and distorted by wire fencing. The ragged soundtrack, at first totally incomprehensible, gets clearer and clearer as the image gradually focuses. "The complex life shows itself bit by bit to him’’, a French voice reads out at the end.

Backman showed in 'La vie en l'envers' the comic effect of backward movements - a nail jumping out of a piece of wood to leap towards the hammer, a sandwich getting bigger instead of smaller in the mouth, liquid leaving the glass to fill up the bottle.

A 8-chapter ("tableaux") short film that tells the story of a gambler who ends his life on the guillotine.

Paris, 1962. A scientist formulates a serum that transforms him into a dog. It's only when he changes back into a human that his troubles begin.

She had been a director. He had been a film critic. Lockdowned in their flat, rue des chaufourniers, he begins to carry out household chores, which she would take charge of criticizing.

The film takes place in a Parisian suburb and brings us into the closest possible contact with the people who live here and takes us into the privacy of their lives. A series of personal accounts and shots of the decorated interiors of apartments and houses with no hint as to where we are, no names. No stigma attached, no label given. For these are not the subject of the film, which seeks instead to give a face and a voice – a sort of private landscape – to a space that has come to represent all that is standardized and anonymous.

In this anxious and hectic time, Happy Life explores those unusual outlets that soothe the turmoil of the body and mind. In a meditative journey through these analgesic places, this documentary essay paints a portrait of a society in seek of meaning and relief.

Two young Parisians, Raoul de Gardefeu and Bobinet, are in love with Metella, a beautiful young woman aspiring to high society. Metella rejects them both in favour of a richer and older man.

Once upon a time there was a Parisian dog, naive and passionate, called Chien Pourri (rotten dog). With Chaplapla, his faithful gutter companion, Chien Pourri walks the streets of Paris, truffles blowing in the wind. No matter what disasters it causes, it always gets back on its feet! So much so that other dogs are starting to find it suspicious ... A program of five short films to follow the crazy adventures of Chien Pourri and his friends and introduce the poetry of Paris to the little ones! By the Panic in the Village and the Grand Méchant Renard (Big Bad Fox) teams.

Paris, 1956. Everything is going smoothly for Roger, married to Denise, and Paul, married to Monique, until the day they win a house in a radio contest. The difficulties of living together and the intrusion of their parents-in-law lead to a falling out.

Tristan found a dead cat on the corner of his street, hit by a car and left there in the gutter to rot in the rain. The young man is shaken, and the image of the dead cat begins to haunt him.

Chercher la Vie ("Looking tor Life") introduces the viewer to two women, Anne-Rose and Rosemène, who each have their own particular way of battling through life. The former makes lunches in a factory yard in Port-au-Prince and sells her meals to the factory workers; the latter is employed in the same factory as a production worker making pullovers and T-shirts. Every day she buys her midday meal on credit from Anne-Rose. Through the connection between these two women the film reveals part of their daily work and the constant battle for survival that they lead together with other women in Haiti.

This animated short film by Carlos Kalonji was produced in Kinshasa as part of the beneficiary project Afriqu'Anim'Action, piloted by Studios Malembe Maa (Democratic Republic of Congo). In the film, three police officers deal with traffic infractions in the buzzing streets of a city neighborhood. A humorous tone is set from the beginning, when we see a policeman studying the rules of the highway code just minutes before beginning his shift.

The bare life draws us into a hallucinating journey: from the incandescent set of a city under lockdown, with the rare survivors wandering aimlessly, to a hospital where the nurses and the patients carrying the virus are applying a daily ritual of life and death gestures. Antoine d’Agata transforms these opaque spaces into a theatre of shadows, freed from all pretences of reality, and obliterates the very surface of things, the skin of beings and the skin of the world, only to better reveal its tragic dimension.

Short ethnographic documentary showing some everyday life scenes based upon footage shot by director Luc de Heusch in Congo in 1954 reassembled by Damien Mottier (Université Paris Nanterre) and Grace Winter (CINEMATEK).

A rich Brazilian, Mendoza, visited Paris in 1900 and was romantically involved with the star of Offenbach's 'La vie parisienne' which was playing at the time. Thirty five years later, he returns with his son and granddaughter, who is engaged to a young Frenchman. But Mendoza's puritanical son forbids the marriage. Mendoza and the actress's friends conspire to change his mind and convert him to 'Parisian life.'

Is it possible, when you come from a family of Maghreb immigrants and you are a girl or a woman, to invent your life, to choose to leave the traditional universe, to break up with your family, without renouncing that which bases you, to the recognition of your own? Four portraits of women bear witness to a generation that lives its life through its own choices. Their mothers were illiterate but dreamed of a university education for their daughters. They invested their children with their hopes, but also with their lacks, their solitudes.