
Acting
Brigitte Sy
Born
1956-01-26 (70)
Place of birth
Paris, France
Known for
Acting
Credits
47 titles
Brigitte Sy (born 26 January 1956) is a French actress and filmmaker. Her directorial film debut, Les Mains libres, was released in 2010 to critical acclaim in France. She is the mother of the actors Louis Garrel and Esther Garrel whom she had with the director Philippe Garrel. In an Arte short film collection about AIDS awareness, she revealed that she has been HIV-positive since 1990, contracted from a partner who previously had a drug addiction. She also addresses the issue in Les mains libres and L'endroit idéal where the protagonist, Barbara (played by Ronit Elkabetz), is HIV-positive. She opposes the feminist #MeToo movement (#BalanceTonPorc in France) and signed an anti-metoo letter …
Known for
6.8In the small bordertown of Villefranche, lost in the heart of a large forest, crime rate is six times higher than elsewhere in the area. Each new crime Major Laurène Weiss solves with the help of her unusual team makes her sink deeper and deeper into secrets of the area.
Black Spot
2017
7.0Set in the shrine of French dance, the Garnier Opera house, L'Opera follows three characters whose dreams clash with reality, whose ambitions collide with expectations, and whose purity faces corruption.
L'Opéra
2021
7.0Garance is a young actress, but not a star. She manages everything as best she can, valiant, cheerful, a soldier, and she finds in alcohol an unconditional fuel, a source of comfort. Garance changes her life and begins an eight-year journey of moves, work, encounters, parties and anxieties, joys and hardships… An intimate, friendly, and sexual revolution. But she consumes, more and more. Until the very possibility of death…
Another Day
2026
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Têtard
2019
6.2Several scary black-and-white animated segments in different styles appeal to our fear(s) of the dark.
Fear(s) of the Dark
2007
5.5A middle-class house in the middle of nowhere. A council estate in Sète. A mother and daughter. Two childhood friends. A vanishing. Blackmail. A clash between two worlds.
All That Divides Us
2017
Film credits
2020s · 4 titles
7.0Garance is a young actress, but not a star. She manages everything as best she can, valiant, cheerful, a soldier, and she finds in alcohol an unconditional fuel, a source of comfort. Garance changes her life and begins an eight-year journey of moves, work, encounters, parties and anxieties, joys and hardships… An intimate, friendly, and sexual revolution. But she consumes, more and more. Until the very possibility of death…
Another Day
2026
6.3In 2016, French writer and photographer Carole Achache took her own life. After Carole's death, her daughter Mona Achache, a film director, discovers thousands of photos, letters and recordings that Carole left behind, but these buried secrets make her disappearance even more of an enigma. Through the power of filmmaking and the beauty of incarnation with the help of actress Marion Cotillard, the director brings her mother back to life to retrace her journey and find out who she really was.
Little Girl Blue
2023
No synopsis available yet.
Le Joueur
2027
NRThe love story between Jean, a great French writer and his/her young mistress Marie Louise, ends during a long break from which each emerges willy-nilly, until fate puts them face to face with one another. In one version of the film, the main couple is made up of a man and a woman, in the other version, two women.
La rupture
2020
2010s · 13 titles
5.5A middle-class house in the middle of nowhere. A council estate in Sète. A mother and daughter. Two childhood friends. A vanishing. Blackmail. A clash between two worlds.
All That Divides Us
2017
6.9Noumouké, from the suburb of Paris, is about to decide which brother's foot steps to follow - the lawyer student Soulaymaan or the gangster Demba.
Street Flow
2019
5.7Antoine is a joyful but disenchanted photographer. His only true friend, Mateo, is 7 years old and the son of his neighbor, who is often absent. One day, he hears a piano sonata coming from the building across the courtyard. Mesmerized by the music, he becomes obsessed by Elena, the beautiful but mysterious pianist, and starts to photograph her at every opportunity. An intense relationship develops between fragile and idealistic Elena and Antoine, who is transformed by this encounter.
A Place on Earth
2013
7.0Roméo and Juliette are two young actors. They fall in love at first sight, move in together and make a baby. A love story and the founding of a home like millions of others. Except that their little boy, Adam, behaves abnormally. The young parents try hard to persuade themselves that everything is okay but, with the passing of time, they cannot delude themselves anymore: their son has a problem. From now on, war is declared. A war against illness. A war against Death. A war against despair.
Declaration of War
2011
7.0Following a city councils decision, a women's shelter will soon be closed and social workers have only three months to accommodate the residents.
The Invisibles
2019
6.3Yann, a cook, and Nadia, a waitress and mother of 9-year-old child, decide to risk everything on the purchase of a restaurant. With plenty of talent, energy, love and dreams, but no finance of their own, they find themselves forced into a jungle of financing and bank loans that quickly overwhelms them. To bail them out, Nadia has to take a job in Canada, while Yann is forced to stay behind to save the restaurant. Together, he and the child confront a relentless avalanche of creditors, an uncaring system and the daily grind from which there is no respite… Yann finally understands that his only chance of salvation lies in joining his lover – as well as reuniting mother and child – by following Nadia to Canada and a better life.
A Better Life
2011
6.4The new film by French director Cédric Kahn focusses on Philippe Fournier, a man who lives with his 2 sons, having decided not to give them back to their mother after she won custody of the children. The children Okyesa and Tsali must grow up in the shadow, hunted by the police but always free and on the move.
Wild Life
2014
6.0Hired to oversee the security of a superstore, Pierre soon discovers a dark secret and becomes a threat to the system he helped create.
Closed Circuit
2013
NRThe story of a wannabe actor who falls in love with a camgirl.
Online Billie
2019
5.8Jeanne Dorwa, 57, faces early retirement when she falls head-over-heels in love with 35-year-old Pascal, throwing her life and everyone around her into turmoil.
Unexpected Love
2015
4.9François has everything he could ever want, until he is kicked out of the house by his wife after his umpteenth slip up; after moving back in with his parents, he vows to win her back.
Nuts
2013
6.715-year-old Chérif feels like a million bucks behind the wheel of a stolen car. Placed under the guardianship of his Aunt and Uncle, he has to return to his apprenticeship as a mason. It's his last chance. But every night graffiti artists descend upon the city's walls. And with this, a whole new world opens up before him...
Vandal
2013
6.1Sylvain, a young man, devotes his life to small, local movie theater destined to be shut down. He lives in the theater's basement and is the theater programer, projectionist, and ticket seller. Each night, after the last screening, he leaves the building to carry out a ritual killing.
The Last Screening
2011
2000s · 7 titles
6.2Several scary black-and-white animated segments in different styles appeal to our fear(s) of the dark.
Fear(s) of the Dark
2007
6.91968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?
Regular Lovers
2005
10.0Martial, seventeen year-old, has ran away to Nice, to see his mother, singer with a chaotic life. Near her house, he meets three women : an employee of the Organization managing unemployment, a former classmate, and owner of the place. Three educational and sentimental fragments. Three secrets. Three songs.
Nice
2009
4.325 years of the life of Marie, a Parisian party girl, first teenager leaving her mother at 17, then short star of the song, and finally mother of a teenage girl, Esther, who flees as she fled her mother.
Rien dans les poches
2008
7.1In Paris, a university student attempts to lead a double life - in love with her French boyfriend Pascal, and staying true to her Algerian family, particular her strict, traditional father. In Algiers, her cousin Yacine leads a parallel life, preparing to leave his girlfriend to move to Paris.
Choosing Love
2008
6.0A young mother Nina and her son Enzo find themselves sleeping on the streets of Paris. Eventually there lifestyle leads them to Versailles.
Versailles
2008
8.0I am there. I say nothing. In the lounge, the boxes still opened from our moving in. My father. My mother. Come to comfort me. Her father. Her mother. Incapable to say the words. To put into words what has happened. And outside, the rain. Diluvian. Improbable.
Déluge
2006
1990s · 4 titles
7.1For those who were young, living under the delusions of love and soft drugs in Paris, May 1968 - even if the guitar is still playing, they can't hear it any longer.
I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar
1991
5.8Outwardly a chilling portrait of the aimless lives of unemployed inner city youths living on society's fringe, the underlying message of this volatile drama seems to call for violence to rectify social injustices. The film centers on two teenaged gangs who basically terrorize their neighborhoods with their anarchic behavior. There are few limits to their unpleasant philosophy of "desire equals acquisition." The loosely structured tale reaches its climax at a concert where the two rival groups collide.
Crack 6T
1997
6.5An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.
Genealogies of a Crime
1997
3.2French novelist Vincent Ravalec made his directorial debut with this French drama about small-time crook Gaston (Yvan Attal) who poses as a millionaire after he picks up hitchhiking 16-year-old Marie-Pierre (Virginie Lanoue). Actually living in a seedy apartment, Gaston deals in stolen goods, but he soon climbs to bigger heists, including car thefts. Concealing his illegal activities, Gaston operates his company, Extramill, out of upscale, posh offices, while he and Marie-Pierre move into a sedate upper-middle-class neighborhood. Life is sweet, but the onset of paranoia, kinky sex activities, and police probes eventually culminate in violence.
Melody for a Hustler
1998
1980s · 5 titles
7.4When film director Mathieu casts a famous actress to portray a character based on his aspiring-actress wife, he creates a rift in his marriage. French filmmaker Philippe Garrel's family members portray versions of themselves in this lyrical drama.
Emergency Kisses
1989
7.2Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.
The Ministries of Art
1989
Reel 26 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XXVI
1982
6.3In the mist of the Algerian events, a man finds a fugitive happiness beside a local woman.
Liberty at Night
1984
8.5A famous director wants to make a film about true love, the kind his grandparents experienced when they lived together for 60 years. For this project, he holds auditions in a commercial real estate office. He asks the actors and actresses he meets to tell him about their conception of Love, with results that differ from those he expected...
Casting
1983
1970s · 2 titles
6.1Marie is nineteen and bored in her little suburban life with no future. In a café, she meets the charismatic and beautiful Gerard. Blinded by adoration, Mary decides to leave her parents and her clerk job to live with the man she considers as the love of her life. But Gerard is a pimp, who soon forces her into prostitution. From within homes to out on the streets, the young woman gradually discovers a world of decay and violence.
Memoirs of a French Whore
1979
4.9Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Cinématon
1978
Series credits
6.8In the small bordertown of Villefranche, lost in the heart of a large forest, crime rate is six times higher than elsewhere in the area. Each new crime Major Laurène Weiss solves with the help of her unusual team makes her sink deeper and deeper into secrets of the area.
Black Spot
2017
7.0Set in the shrine of French dance, the Garnier Opera house, L'Opera follows three characters whose dreams clash with reality, whose ambitions collide with expectations, and whose purity faces corruption.
L'Opéra
2021
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Têtard
2019
5.5After becoming one of the rare female rabbis, Léa juggles everyone's complex questions with her chaotic personal life and her own search for meaning.
Reformed
2025
6.7No synopsis available yet.
Quadras
2017
Behind the camera
5.5On a night of April 1957, Albertine, a brillant and rebel 19-year-old girl, jumps from the wall of the prison where she’s serving a sentence for a holdup. In her fall, a bone from her ankle breaks: the astragal. She is rescued by Julien, a justice fugitive, and so is born a burning passion between them. He takes her to Paris and hides her. But while he leads his gangster life here and there, the young woman struggles for her freedom and against the wounds inflicted by Julien’s absence, and writes poetry.
Astragal
2015
5.5On a night of April 1957, Albertine, a brillant and rebel 19-year-old girl, jumps from the wall of the prison where she’s serving a sentence for a holdup. In her fall, a bone from her ankle breaks: the astragal. She is rescued by Julien, a justice fugitive, and so is born a burning passion between them. He takes her to Paris and hides her. But while he leads his gangster life here and there, the young woman struggles for her freedom and against the wounds inflicted by Julien’s absence, and writes poetry.
Astragal
2015
5.7Anna, stuck in a relationship with an authoritarian and violent man, falls in love with Claude who is planning a robbery. The robbery goes wrong and Claude ends up in prison.
Le bonheur est pour demain
2024
5.7Anna, stuck in a relationship with an authoritarian and violent man, falls in love with Claude who is planning a robbery. The robbery goes wrong and Claude ends up in prison.
Le bonheur est pour demain
2024
5.5Barbara is a filmmaker who has been working in the prison environment for a few years now. She is preparing a film written and directed by long-term inmates in a prison in the projects around Paris. Twice a week, Barbara goes to the prison where she shoots interviews with the inmates which will serve as a basis for the writing of their screenplay.
Free Hands
2010
6.5There's drama aplenty for the travelling theatre company Chekhov Cabaret. The actors share the good times and the bad as a nomadic tribe where work and private life always mingle. They don’t mince words, these obstreperous actors with a sardonic sense of humour. Theatre always comes first.
Ogres
2016
