Le Jour

In this eight-part documentary series, Prigent chronicles the final 36 hours prior to crucial seasonal runway shows featuring creations by some of the fashion world's leading designers: Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Jean Paul Gaultier, Lanvin... In SIGNE CHANEL (2005) and MARC JACOBS & LOUIS VUITTON (2007), documentarian Loic Prigent unveiled rare and refreshing glimpses behind the doors of some of the world's leading fashion houses. THE DAY BEFORE captures 8 differents fashion houses 36 hours before a show. The backstage, the ateliers, the designer in studio, the fittings, the stress and the dramas occuring in this specific period of time. Each episode is totally different but tells the same story: how to create in a state of emergency? This is a never seen before full access story.

Georges has Down syndrome, living at a mental-institution, Harry is a busy businessman, giving lectures for young aspiring salesmen. He is successful in his business life, but his social life is a disaster since his wife left him and took their two children with her. This weekend his children came by train to meet him, but Harry, working as always, forgot to pick them up. Neither his wife or his children want to see him again and he is driving around on the country roads, anguished and angry. He almost runs over Georges, on the run from the institution since everybody else went home with their parents except him, whose mother is dead. Harry tries to get rid of Georges but he won't leave his new friend. Eventually a special friendship forms between the two of them, a friendship which makes Harry a different person.

Moulay Yacoub starts a physical and poetic journey of self-knowledge across Morocco.

In a cabin of the deep of the forest, a child and his father lead a wild and hard life in utmost isolation. The child grows up fearing and admiring his father, with the ghosts haunting the forest as his only companions. Until the day he discovers the neighbouring village and meets a young girl there, Manon. At her side, he discovers that love exists. From then on he won't cease to search for the place where his father's love for him is hiding.

A sprawling drama centered on five key days in a family's life.

After committing a murder, a man locks himself in his apartment and recollects the events the led him to the killing.

Algeria, the 1930s. Younes is nine years old when he is put in his uncle's care in Oran. Rebaptized Jonas, he grows up among the Rio Salado youths, with whom he becomes friends. Emilie is one of the gang; everyone is in love with her. A great love story develops between Jonas and Emilie, which is soon unsettled by the conflicts troubling the country.

When a fortuneteller predicted Lisa's death on August 15 in midst of fear and violence, she shrugged. Yet, this morning, as the sun rises over a deserted and heat-scorched city, the police is desperate. The killer of three women will strike again by midnight. Suddenly Lisa feels less serene. Especially since she is sure, a man has broken into the empty building. August 15th will be a very hot day….

At Christmas time, 19 year old Simon returns home to visit his dysfunctional family with Louise, a fearless girl he met during his train ride. While Simon struggles to cope with the growing distance between him and his parents, he starts to examine his feelings when Louise develop a liaison of her own with his childhood friend Mathieu.

Three thirty-year-old friends with a strong appetite for women and leisure life, supported by different people, live very well. Until one of them is forced to work. His two mates will do everything to free him from this calvary.

After being bullied for months at school, 16-year-old Jonathan douses himself with gasoline and lights a match. Now, in an induced coma, his body covered in burns, his life is on hold, his parents are in shock and the school is in turmoil.

“Quitter le jour” is an old expression used by French miners to designate the act of going down to the mine. Words of great poetry which contrast with a hellish daily life. “Quitter le jour” is an impossible equation, that of renouncing the world of the living to stay alive. Neither the soul nor the body of the character are saved: one, if it has not already vanished at the time of the descent, is carried away by the fever; the other follows, consumed by the depths.

Jeanne works as an auxiliary in a maternity in Marseilles. Day and night, Jeanne and her colleagues fight to help mothers and their babies against the lack of staff and constant management pressure. Jeanne lives with her 18 year-old daughter, Zoé. When a tragedy occurs at the maternity and Zoé leaves to study in Paris, Jeanne’s secret past suddenly resurfaces and forces her to assert her life choices.

In 1944, a retired German detachment found itself stranded in a French town. The inhabitants try to live in good harmony with the occupants. But one day kids, playing with a grenade, accidentally cause the death of an SS lieutenant.

Unable to repay their debts, Milan and Victor, best friends and co-owners of a Paris nightclub, are lured into a drug deal that goes bad. Tortured by police, they negotiate their freedom against an overwhelming testimony that condemns their psychotic liaison to prison. Six years later, the men's nightmare begins again when the pyschopath is granted his freedom. Now, not having talked for years, the old friends are united again in order to survive.