Les Loups

A team of young journalists attempt to free itself from the constraints of established rules and tell its readers the truth.

In 1942, the young Jewish girl Misha, her Russian mother Gerusha and her German father Reuven hide from the Germans in a small house in Ardennes, Belgium. Misha is very connected to her mother that advises her that if one day a person comes to her saying "love of my life", she would follow him or her without any question. When her parents are captured by the Nazis, Misha is delivered to a German family and the abusive matriarch gives a bad treatment to the girl. However, she finds support in the family of Ernest and his deranged wife Marthe that supplies groceries to foster family. Misha loves Ernest's dogs and the old man gives a compass to her and tells that her parents have been sent to East to forced labor. When the old couple is denounced for sheltering the girl and arrested by the Germans, Misha flees through the woods heading east. Along her journey seeking out her parents...

Alain, "a young wolf", elegant and racy, is maintained by the princess Linzani. At the same time, he goes out with a girl of his age, Sylvie, who despite her bold attitude has never had a lover.

Not long before World War I, in a French Alpine town near the Italian border, a pack of slaughtered wolves is delivered to local taxidermist Leon (Patrick Chesnais). A surviving black cub comes down from the mountains looking for his family, and is saved from discovery and certain death by Leon’s young daughter Angele, who releases him back into the wild. The Great War comes and goes, making local foundry owners the Garcins rich. Family patriarch Albert Garcin (Michel Galabru), who happens to be Angele’s godfather, has given a free lifetime’s lease of a shack in the hills to a gypsy woman (played in flashbacks by Elisa Tovati in which she’s seen, literally, having dances with wolves on stage). Her son Guiseppe (Stefano Accorsi), who appears to be slightly mentally handicapped, guards the wolves he’s befriended up there, especially the black pack leader he calls Carbone.

A woman travels from the big city to the countryside. The locals are suspicious.

In the mid-18th century, the Beast is hunted around the Château de Saint-Alban. In the mid-20th century, a new kind of psychiatry is invented there. Theatre and madness span the centuries.

Soon, there will be wolves everywhere in France again. People have to learn to cohabit with them.

Three gangsters on the run break into a rehabilitation center for delinquent teenagers run by the couple Roger and Irène. The residents are divided over how to deal with the three bad guys, who want to take over the home.

An American general with highly confidential defence information has been kidnapped by terrorists and is being held in a cliff-top fortress in the Mediterranean.

Othilie spends her vacations with her uncle Antoine, an old lonesome bear. In charge of a regional park, Antoine lives a long way from Paris, in company of the shepherd Tambourin, whose frightening face hides the innocence of a new-born child. Since the arrival of Othilie, odd things happen. A slaughtered sheep is found and weird howls are sounding through the night. The wolves are not far away.

In the Carpathian Mountains, there are just five shepherd dogs to protect a herd of three hundred sheep from wolves in the region. A lone wolf wanders in search of his prey with assistance from a crow. But the attack has to be timed perfectly or it would result in instant death by the dogs or a shotgun by the shepherd. Explore the conflicted relationship between man and wolves that has subsisted for decades in these regions.

After a suicide attempt, a young easily influenced biologist is recruited by a criminal organization based in the hills above Nice.

A secret agent is summoned by the head of a counter espionage organization, to Trieste where he is to unmask a potential enemy operating in Venice.

A Nazi spy has stolen a gas mask filter of formidable efficiency in Paris. Two agents from the 2nd office have the task of going to take him back to Berlin.

After being missing for almost 80 years and despite the obstacles, the wolves are on their way back to their former territories. The documentary tells the great mystery of the dispersal of wolves: how the young wolves leave the territory where they were born and the way in which these adventurers set out to conquer new territories. For two years, Jean-Michel Bertrand conducted real research to try to understand the complex and erratic functioning of these young wolves, their encounters with their peers, and the opportunities to become a couple.

Les Loups was constructed as we construct a place. "I tried to enter into a state of observation which would permit me to create targets: a face, an ordinary object, materials... all were sufficient elements to feel the strange danger born of the opening of certain sub-concious pathways. The past, present, future, movement, immobility, obscurity, light...all this is interchangeable. Nothing is important. Eat, laugh, drink with others to feel alive. (Francisco Ruiz de Infante)