Maurice Najman

A has-been French filmmaker wants a Hong Kong actress to be the heroine in a rendering of Les Vampires.

Anita is a barmaid at the center of a community of street preachers, prostitutes, dealers and users. When a beloved friend (and young drug dealer) is caught by narcotics agents, Anita takes it upon herself to score for his struggling clients.

In a somewhat deflated story of robbery and deception set against the rooftops and byways of Paris, a group of enterprising petty thieves take advantage of the dog days of August to burglarize vacated apartments. At this time of year, all Parisiens are on vacation elsewhere, and the city is invaded by tourists on vacation from their own cities. In this mass rearrangement of the European population, the thieves get away with their looting until they run into an architect who catches them in the act. But his morals are nothing to brag about, as he gets more involved in what they are doing and wants some of their take. He is also smitten with one of the down-and-out women the thieves have been supporting (Dominque Laffin). As in so many French dramas, these conflicting relationships are doomed to be resolved only by tragedy.

Only two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in January 1990, almost two hundred controversial East German visual and performance artists—including Jürgen Böttcher, the Autoperforation Artists, AG Geige, Via Lewandowsky, Trak Wendisch, Conny Hege, Klaus Killisch, Helga Paris and Hanns Schimansky—presented works rarely shown in the GDR at the exhibition space in the former La Villette slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Paris.