Brigitte Sy

Acting

Brigitte Sy

Born 1956-01-26 · Paris, France

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 in Le Monde, on 9 January 2018, arguing that men have the freedom to harass (importuner) women. She is of Sephardic Jewish descent. Source: Article "Brigitte Sy" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Acting credits

Street Flow poster
6.9

Noumouké, 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

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Le Joueur

Little Girl Blue poster
6.3

In 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

Nice poster
10.0

Martial, 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

All That Divides Us poster
5.5

A 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

Declaration of War poster
7.0

Roméo 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

Regular Lovers poster
6.9

1968 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

The Invisibles poster
7.0

Following 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

Memoirs of a French Whore poster
6.1

Marie 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

Genealogies of a Crime poster
6.5

An 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

Emergency Kisses poster
7.4

When 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

A Better Life poster
6.3

Yann, 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

Closed Circuit poster
6.0

Hired 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

Crack 6T poster
5.8

Outwardly 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

Choosing Love poster
7.1

In 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

Online Billie poster
NR

The story of a wannabe actor who falls in love with a camgirl.

Online Billie

2019

No artwork available
NR

Reel 26 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Cinématon XXVI

1982

Cinématon poster
4.9

Cinématon 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

Déluge poster
8.0

I 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

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar poster
7.1

For 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

Fear(s) of the Dark poster
6.3

Several scary black-and-white animated segments in different styles appeal to our fear(s) of the dark.

Fear(s) of the Dark

2007

Nuts poster
4.9

François 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

Liberty at Night poster
6.3

In the mist of the Algerian events, a man finds a fugitive happiness beside a local woman.

Liberty at Night

1984

Rien dans les poches poster
4.3

25 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

Behind the camera

Astragal poster
5.5

On 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

Astragal poster
5.5

On 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

Free Hands poster
5.5

Barbara 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

Le bonheur est pour demain poster
5.7

Anna, 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

Le bonheur est pour demain poster
5.7

Anna, 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

Ogres poster
6.5

There'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