Roland Amstutz

This program of short films by Vincent Ravalec (Never twice, Le Masseur and Les Mots de l'amour) deals with themes such as desire and death through the journey of a group of characters.

The charismatic criminal Dobermann, who got his first gun when he was christened, leads a gang of brutal robbers. After a complex and brutal bank robbery, they are being hunted by the Paris police. The hunt is led by the sadistic cop Christini, who only has one goal: to catch Dobermann at any cost.

After his mother's death, young Ricky has only one obsession: kill his dad, who'll be released from jail the following week. On his way to the prison, Ricky meets Pillier, a down on his luck salesman...

After much hesitation, a gigolo decides to take a shot of a radical remedy to save his failing virility.

A love story or a tale of the resistance, this poignant movie tells both the haunting story of a French resistance cell in Lyon but also the love of Lucie Aubrac for her husband...

Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?

Georges Deblache, a despondent middle-aged cop, falls for his partner's wife.

Paul Dedalus is at a crossroads in his life. He has to make several decisions; should he complete his doctorate, does he want to become a full professor, does he really love his long-standing girlfriend, or should he re-start with one of his other lovers?

A young Italian, living in Paris with his French wife, is about to become a father. Before the baby is born, Alberto must repay his father for every expense from his own birth until he left home.

In Montelimar, four young women whom life has not spared want to emerge from mediocrity. They decide to rob a bank, but everything is not so simple and the perfectly developed heist could turn into disaster.

A brief, fictionalized time period in the life of Professor Kant. The story is set in his hometown, Konigsberg, chronicling his last few years prior to his death in 1804 at the age of 79.

What there is of a plot in this drama serves mainly as a vehicle for the exploration of character. In the story, Michel (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) is a recent widower. As the story opens, he and his friend Andre (Philippe Nahon) are sharing a drink on Christmas Eve. He takes a yellow scarf from a woman he knows (Laura Morante) and teasingly refuses to return it. Throughout the remainder of the film, the scarf reappears, as does the woman, until they wind up in bed together at the end of the film. Before that happens, Michel wanders around Paris, viewing the festivities with a jaundiced eye which serves to heighten the unattractiveness of those he observes. Later he has dinner with a group at Andre's house, and his poor opinion of human nature is amply supported by the events that occur then.

Clément, a young entrepreneur, is a happy father: married to the beautiful Alex, he is also the happy father of "Petit-Bonheur", his son. Despite his 30 years, he can't live without his father, Paul, a musician and widower, with whom he has a very close relationship. In addition to this exclusive relationship, the latter also takes care of his grandson on a regular basis. Two points which are not without provoking a certain jealousy in Alex. One day, "Petit-Bonheur", under Paul's care, falls down a staircase. At the hospital, where the child undergoes X-rays, Clément can't stand the wait for the exams and reprimands his father harshly. After this incident, the news is fortunately good: "Petit-Bonheur" has nothing serious and finds with joy the arms of his parents. Clément then realizes that his father has disappeared.

Bernard Nissille’s little gem imagines a love triangle between the director, the Queen, and the Bear during a staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. An actor who appeared with Bulle Ogier in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, Nissille enlisted the brilliant opera and film director Patrice Chéreau to appear in the film opposite Ogier, Michel Piccoli, and Emmanuelle Salinger, the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s The Sentinel.

This French-Belgian drama, based on a novel by Odon von Horvath, is set in 1938 in a German city along the banks of the Rhine and Ruhr rivers. It attempts to provide insight as to why certain German youths were so easily lead into becoming Nazis by using two narrators, one a teacher who challenged the movement and another by a student who embraced it. Pabst teaches a group of teenage boys, all of whom seem to be young Nazis. The trouble begins when Pabst and a WW I vet are assigned to take the class to a military camp and a nature outing for urban kids. While there a boy is brutally murdered and they blame one local girl. During her trial, Pabst speaks out against Hitler and becomes pariah. Still he continues investigating the death, at great personal expense until at last he brings the real killer to justice.

A trucker, an accountant, a former plumber hospitalised after a suicide attempt... Presided over by the accountant, the three families decide to buy a truck, a trucker's dream. The father, practical joker, and larger-than-life lover, keeps a watchful eye. The children are his accomplices. One is his heroine. His daughter is his other heroine. A puzzle of life's desires in which all veers into the imaginary, into dreams of far-off lands.

Mado is followed in the street by an unknown man. He offers her to go the hotel. She accepts, they sleep together and then split. Mado does not want to see him again, because she is married with Jean, and has a teenager son, Stephane. But Yves gave her his phone number. One day, Mado calls him.... An unusual love story.

The adventures of Rak, who after his dismissal begins to reflect on the meaning of the word work and on the act of working.

Arnaud Gensac, unlucky inspector, loses his police card, which falls into the hands of a graphic designer who witnesses the murder of a kingpin. And serious trouble begins for Arnaud.

Ali, a young Algerian who carried out an attack in Algiers, hastily leaves the city to join the resistance. But he is disappointed to find that the National Liberation Army consists of only a few fighters scattered throughout the mountains. However, he is impressed by the authority of the leader, Si Tayeb, who gives him a weapon. Meanwhile, a young French sergeant, Gachon, arrives in Algeria with his contingent of conscripts. In civilian life, he is a schoolteacher, and he becomes the colonel's secretary. One night, the FLN group invades a village, the dechra of Beni Allel: waking the inhabitants, the leader gives them a propaganda speech to incite them to fight the French, then gives them weapons; He claims that all the other villages have rallied to their cause, which is false. When he finds himself in difficulty at one point, he is rescued by Ali, who saves the day with his authority and skill.

A look at the sexual and professional lives of three people — a television director, his ex-girlfriend, and a sex worker.

A beautiful woman hires an intrepid adventurer to help find her father, who has disappeared in the jungle while searching for a rare and priceless butterfly. Along the way they run into cannibals, a race of Amazon warriors and all the usual attractions one would expect to find in a lost jungle.

A French family is shown as they go through the daily routines of life. Arguing, feasting, crying, and yearning for love are just some of the human emotions encountered. The mood wavers between excessive noise to silence while those not participating in the conversations eavesdrop.

A Paris flea market vendor is transformed into a vigilante after his fiancée is murdered by three vicious thugs on a commuter train. As the revenge-minded young man tracks the killers, a veteran police inspector leads a parallel investigation.

In France in the near future, revolt and chaos erupt. A right-wing politician, Philippe Muphand, is set to take control when his lady friend Caroline walks out, announcing she will take up with the first fool she sees. The fool is Serge Laine, a professor and author of the prize-winning "Le voyage qui ne finit pas," headed to the train station for tickets to Barcelona where he and his wife will enjoy a second honeymoon and he will lecture at the university. Caroline seduces Serge, and he soon abandons wife, family, job, and honesty to embrace Caroline, the romanticism of Jack London, and murder.

No synopsis available yet.

A Red Cross inspection team visits a prison and holds interviews with a range of inmates.

Biography of the life of Guillaume Apollinaire.

To make his neighbor no longer eye his wife, Paulo decides to put on the wall in front of his house a painting representing New York. A waste of time, the neighbor continues to look at his wife...

The name of painter Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) is synonymous for a kind of painting style which celebrates carefree romantic life, indoors and out. He was a painter during the final decades of the French monarchy. In this story, he and his brother Cyprien (Robin Renucci), who is an early pioneer in medical anatomy (he dissected corpses and made drawings of what he found in them), have fallen in love with the same woman, Marianne (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), a laundress. This attraction has not escaped the notice of Salmon d'Anglas (Sami Frey), a conniving nobleman, who has his heart set on getting revenge on Jean-Honore (Joachim de Almeida) for refusing his patronage and becoming the darling of the French court.

A man escapes from prison, and leads in his run the woman of his life.

The Venetian performance world is on the alert: an impresario is looking for talent to stage what he defines as the most beautiful opera of his time. Everyone goes there from their pushy little merry-go-round to attract the favors of the character and extricate themselves from misery. But the main interested party hardly seems to be sensitive to these effects.

After the apocalypse, a group of survivors take shelter in a junkyard beside a nuclear crater. Led by a messianic punk rocker named Emanou, they hide out from corrupt authorities while indulging their wildest fantasies.

A young Swiss drug addict has been imprisoned for robbery, and must wait and wait for his upcoming trial, all the while isolated and without hope of parole - the police are convinced he is a dealer and not just a user. He hears from his son that his girlfriend has a new man, and begins to despair of ever coming to trial, or of having another relationship like the one he lost. This fiction film is said to be based on a true story.

Everybody takes advantage of Fernand who has just come out of prison.

With the help of journalist Diane Castelain, Parisian police inspectors Leo Gorce and Gu Arenas are trying to solve the murder of a member of the French Parliament, but some dangerous powerful people try to make sure that doesn't happen.

A poor french guy, in love with a 50's actresse, meet her husband who send him in an other dimension to fight for her love.

French television adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's five-act play in verse.

Dr. Paul Calmet is dead. His son Jean again feels the familiar feeling of anguish caused by his father; victim of this torture, he is carrying the virus of misfortune.

From birth to death every subject remains intact. Three ages, three women. Daughter, mother, grandmother. Each of them before and after still and always. And the men too, those they meet those they love.

In this surreal, overstated, black-and-white film by Marcel Schuepbach, a young woman is slowly driven to near insanity by an inner desire for a passionate existence, while she lives a dull life at her grandmother's country home. The grandmother recalls how her own daughter lost hold of sanity and died on her lover's grave -- and she begins to see similarities in her granddaughter's behavior.

Stephane is the mayor of a small village. He is also the manager of the tannery which provides the inhabitants with work. In a fit of anger, he kills his wife. A judge tries to prove his culpability, but it's not an easy task, because there is a political and social pressure.

Following the assassination of President Marc Jarry, a member of the investigation committee refuses to sign off on the committee's final findings.

In 1945, as World War Two comes to a close, five small time crooks unite to form a gang. After several bold robberies they become notorious as "the front-wheel drive gang". The police attempt to stop their crime spree with little success, but how long will their luck last?

After 10 years separation from his wife, a film director (Jean-Louis Trintignant), imagines he can make up with her by giving her a part in his next film, an adaptation of Tshekov's "Three Sisters". He goes location scouting and stays in Bex, a Spa near Lake Leman, together with the three actresses : Julie, his ex-wife (Delphine Seyrig), the mysterious Cecilia, that his producer wants him to take (Lea Massari), and Esther (Valérie Mairesse), a teenager. They all stay in an old decaying hotel. In this isolated mansion the four of them will fight but also discover each other.

A look at 18th-century France, when the depravity of the authorities contributed to social oppression, and the uprisings flared up one after another.

A character, directly addressing the viewer, attempts, through his or her knowledge, a historical reflection on the Paris Commune of 1871. A series of five tableaux retraces the major phases of the events. First comes the analysis of the Second Empire. Then comes the fall of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic on September 4, 1870. Based on texts by Jules Vallès, several actors evoke the event in the contemporary setting of the large housing estates of Bobigny. The third part deals with the period October-March 1871, during which the people of Paris felt, little by little, betrayed by the government. Finally, March 18 is the revolutionary day. Inspired by Bertold Brecht's "Days of the Commune," actors perform the episode "Madame Cabet's Canon." The fifth part, entitled "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," directly evokes the work of the Commune, building and imagining a better world...

After the murder of his wife Alexis is devastated. He withdraws all his savings and embarks on a journey from which he does not think he will return. His meeting with Daphne makes the escape through Tartary even crazier.

Paul is married, a successful engineer, and a conservative candidate in an upcoming local election. He falls in love with Adriana, a café waitress from Italy. Paul's party is very critical of foreign labour and wants to keep Switzerland to the Swiss. Where Paul falls deeper and deeper into the relationship and is ready to leave his wife, Adriana feels the social pressure growing and has to make her own decision.

A manufacturer of furniture sees his business go down and decides to rob banks to pay his staff. Het gets romantically involved with one of his victims.

George is a middle-aged man who lives with his disabled wife. He faces dire financial straits after an investment firm wipes out his life savings and forces him into early retirement. Consequently, he becomes increasingly disillusioned and desperate, which ultimately drives him to the brink of insanity.

In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.

Recording of the play 1789, a collective creation by Théâtre du Soleil at La Cartoucherie de Vincennes in 1970, edited from several shows.

A young man is checked into a mental hospital for unexplained reasons.

After a bout of intense jealousy, Félicité finds herself alone. For one night, as her family dissipates, she relives her torments.

A young writer has just written a new novel, which has been accepted by an editor. A simple and familiar story about the terrifying power the state has over people’s lives.

The love story between Yann and Gaud is passionate, but Gaud is a sailor's wife and she watches her man leave with fear in her heart.