Richard Copans

Whilst seeking out locations in the South of France for his next film, director Luc Moullet comes across a male corpse. He immediately decides to use this to his advantage. By swapping his passport with that of the dead man, Moullet hopes that the world will believe he is dead, thereby ensuring a renewed interest in his work. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, since the dead man was someone rather important...

A travelogue of abandoned strip mining sites in France extolling their potential for recreational use.

A man tries different ways to open a Coca Cola bottle.

A documentary following 12-year-old Paul and his brother Germain during a transformative summer in rural France. The film explores the loss of innocence as Paul confronts the harsh financial and physical realities of his family's farming livelihood, highlighting the father-son bond and an uncertain future.

A documentary about the French writer Jean Genet and his relations with the Palestinian revolution. One day after the September 1982 massacre at the refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Genet visits the camp. Suffering from throat cancer and having written nothing in years, Genet begins to write on the threshold of his death about this disturbing new experience. It leads to his last book, entitled “Un captif amoureux” in which Genet reflects on the Palestinian revolution, its defeat, and the loss of one’s homeland. In this film a young French woman of Algerian origin who is reading the book returns to the landscapes of the Palestinian resistance and the refugee camps full of exiles, in search of Genet.

Mourning his boyfriend Frédéric's death from an overdose, the French filmmaker David Teboul goes to Siberia on a ritual journey. Out here, under the enormous dome of the skies, he finds the free space to disentangle his thoughts again. And in the villages, both young and old people unexpectedly turn out to be prepared to respond to his invitation to talk about an event that changed their lives. Life, death, love and existence.

A filmmaker, armed with a small digital camera, discovers a city through a handful of characters acting as guides. He entrusts the task of narrating the city entirely to its own inhabitants. Whether these guides are famous or anonymous matters less than their unique talent for making their surroundings feel less foreign to us. Thanks to their intersecting paths, the city’s singular identity gradually emerges from this collage of subjective sequences.

"Bania" is an exploration Russian society through its bath-houses in the city, the countryside, in a monastery, a factory or a prison. The film plays with the boundaries between personal and social space in scenes where naked bodies, marked by tattoos, suffering, labour or war, tell a tale. This film was made by a photographer who, confronted by these naked bodies bathed in steam, invents an unique and timeless plastic world, in the style of classical painting.

Resorting to the images that make up three quarters of the last century, Jean-Louis Comolli chose films that crossed his path fifty years ago, discovering his own history of cinema, and particularly the documentary cinema. Visual score orchestrated by a voice off (his) which lists topics that are important to him - the place of the viewer, the fiction in the documentary, the impact of technical progress on the artistic field ... -, the film weaves unpredictable wires between the excerpts .

“You buy a book. You don’t really know why. It lies around, and then one day you open it, almost absentmindedly. And there you are, facing your own innermost secrets.” So begins Stan Neumann’s cinematic adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel, Austerlitz. The vaulted and majestic space of the railway station in Antwerp is where our journey really starts with actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) addressing the camera directly, and musing on the curious nature of railway stations. This bravura opening is startling, charming, and like the unnamed narrator of the book, you surrender to the proceedings and perambulate alongside Lavant, as he journeys through the great buildings of Europe, faded and shuttered hotels and grand colonnades with broken windows.

On Good Friday in Burzet, a small town in Ardeche, the locals gather to remember Jesus's Crucifixion through solemn pageantry. Between 1980 and 2003, Courant filmed this community's annual reenactment of the Via Crucis 24 times.

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From 1954 to 1962, during the Algerian War, French citizens provided concrete assistance to the FLN in France: sheltering refugees, forging documents, facilitating border crossings, and transporting funds. Whether committed to the ideals of the Republic or driven by Third Worldist revolutionaries, they sought to build a bridge of friendship between nations. They paid for their commitment with imprisonment and exile. Four veterans of the Jeanson network recall this period. Today, they are no longer seen as traitors or heroes, but as witnesses recounting "their" war... Silent for 30 years, the "Jeanson network" now bears witness to this history.

From 1954 to 1962, during the Algerian War, French citizens provided concrete assistance to the FLN in France: sheltering refugees, forging documents, facilitating border crossings, and transporting funds. Whether committed to the ideals of the Republic or driven by Third Worldist revolutionaries, they sought to build a bridge of friendship between nations. They paid for their commitment with imprisonment and exile. Four veterans of the Jeanson network recall this period. Today, they are no longer seen as traitors or heroes, but as witnesses recounting "their" war... Silent for 30 years, the "Jeanson network" now bears witness to this history.

Norman Mailer frankly discusses American culture, politics, literature, and his own tumultuous life.

18th century. Anne, grown up, has to "change her clothes" because of her attraction to women. Now a man, he marries and has a great love affair with his new wife, until his past catches up with him. The shocking true story of Anne Grandjean, born intersex, and their resounding trial, which still questions all our certainties today.

Located on the île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, the Paris Law Court looks like an impenetrable fortress. Like Kafka’s castle, it guards its secrets well. It is the place of power. The filmmaker, who worked there for several years as a crime reporter, is extremely familiar with its labyrinthine spaces, its practices, its ceremonies. She comes back to it now, while the Courthouse, such as she knows it, is about to disappear: its relocation is planned in 2017. So, she explores it, camera in hand, on the traces of her experience.

Hervé Le Roux discovered a short film about a strike in a battery factory. Now he's looking for one of the workers seen in this film: a young woman who is very, very angry.

A realist dramedy about dedicated social workers who devote their long shifts to helping pregnant women.

The final film from expatriate American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in France in 1999. Kramer and collaborators tell the somber life story of Ben. After leaving his homeland as a youth, he is greeted in France by menial jobs in industry. In time, he opens a fruit market, finds a wife, fathers a child, and has it all come crashing down when he learns his mother is in danger back home. Upon his return to France, he finds his life in ruin.

An exclusive tour of the new Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre. A fascinating journey to the heart of a culture that has constantly transcended borders. Some 18,000 pieces, more than a thousand years of history spanning a territory from Spain to India: beads, ceramic tiles, architectural elements, carpets, furniture, and a Mamluk porch. How to present this exceptional collection, a testament to a rich and complex civilization that spoke not only Arabic, but also Turkish, Farsi, and Hindi? A few months before its opening to the public on September 22, 2012, Richard Copans followed the creation of the Louvre's new, eighth department dedicated to Islamic art.

An exclusive tour of the new Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre. A fascinating journey to the heart of a culture that has constantly transcended borders. Some 18,000 pieces, more than a thousand years of history spanning a territory from Spain to India: beads, ceramic tiles, architectural elements, carpets, furniture, and a Mamluk porch. How to present this exceptional collection, a testament to a rich and complex civilization that spoke not only Arabic, but also Turkish, Farsi, and Hindi? A few months before its opening to the public on September 22, 2012, Richard Copans followed the creation of the Louvre's new, eighth department dedicated to Islamic art.

A trip to the seaside campsites, along the coast from Spain to the Camargue, like the other side of society, a cleverly mixed deck of cards. Each time the filmmaker pitches his tent, he gets to know his neighbors. And, as is often the case in these cases, they tell a stranger what they wouldn't tell their relatives. They talk about themselves, about what matters to them.

A documentary film by Canadian Director Debra Kellner, produced by Frank Giustra, Serge Lalou, and Richard Copans. Inside My Heart chronicles the plight of three refugee families fleeing their war torn countries over a period of nearly 3 years. Despite having lost everything and their harrowing stories about the atrocities of war, each family continues their fight to stay alive. Unable to return to their countries without the risk of being killed, today they are forced to live with the consequences of their broken dreams.

One hundred and twenty years of film history in a warehouse in Paris. In the reserves of the French Cinematheque, where thousands of cameras and projectors are sleeping on the shelves. Thousands of stationary machinery, we dream of getting back to work as a great machine back in time. To tell their story, the material history of cinema.

Director Richard Copans sets out to find his origins. In search of family ties, he meets a laborer, a Jewish poet's son, a violinist, a genealogist, a descendant of slaves, several cousins and three jazz musicians, whose music will never leave him.

An account of the life and work of the influential Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), an iconic figure and a godless demigod who dared to enter the darkest depths of the human mind; through his correspondence and his own voice, and that of his family and friends.