Petite nature - Softie

Claire is a single mother with a grown-up son. She’s a dedicated midwife who is completely wrapped up in her job. Although the maternity ward where she works is to be closed, she turns down a job offer from a larger clinic because she cannot reconcile their methods with her own ideas about midwifery. In the midst of all this upheaval she receives a phone call that rekindles memories of her youth. Béatrice, her late father’s former mistress, asks to meet her. Béatrice is a true bohemian – loud, colourful, egocentric and completely different to the focussed, helpful Claire. The younger woman asks herself why, after all these years of silence, Béatrice has suddenly decided to approach her for help, and is at first less than enthusiastic. Martin Provost has made a name for himself with powerful portraits of women (Séraphine, Violette). Sage Femme revolves around the encounter between two headstrong women, perfectly cast with two of French cinema’s grandes dames. A dramatic comedy about the need for change, and the question of whether steak, pommes frites and red wine is really what one would call a healthy lunch.

Resemblances can be unnerving. Such as the one between the viscount who went, puffing on his pipe, to the guillotine during the Terror, the army chaplain who has a brigand's tattoos on his chest and is a compulsive baptizer of soldiers, pillagers and rapists, the Parisian down-and-out left as flat as a pancake by an encounter with a steamroller, and, last but not least, the cultivated concierge—and occasional arms dealer—in an upscale building. Almost all the film's characters meet in that very building except, of course, the homeless, who are carted by the cops from pillar to post. Yet amid all this chaos, there are dream spaces, love stories and solid friendships that perhaps allow us to hope that tomorrow will be better than today.

«Ailo's Journey» tells the fight for the survival of a small wild reindeer, frail and vulnerable to the challenges that punctuate his first year. Its awakening to the wild world is a real tale in the heart of the grandiose landscapes of Lapland.

Suzanne is 15 and is having sex with many boys, just for fun, but did not manage to really love one of them. Her family does not understand her. The father does not like her behaviour. When he leaves home, the mother becomes a little bit neurotic. And Suzanne’s brother Robert, begins to beat her as a punishment...

A mutual friend introduces Paul to Frédéric, who is a painter living together with Angèle, an actress who makes films in Italy. Paul wants to work as an actor and keeps his head above water with minor roles. But when he manages to land a small role in a war film, Angèle leaves Frédéric because of Roland, the film assistant working on the set with Paul. Frédéric wants a divorce from Angèle. Paul is awakened one night by a phone call: Frédéric had a fatal accident. In actual fact it was suicide: Frédéric killed himself because Angèle was taken from him.

Ahmed, 18, French of Algerian origin, grew up in the suburbs of Paris. At the university, he meets Farah, a young Tunisian girl, full of energy, who has just arrived in Paris. While discovering a collection of sensual and erotic Arab literature he never imagined existed, Ahmed falls head over heels in love with Farah, and although literally overwhelmed with desire, he will try to resist it.

Suffering and dying do not stop even at the most powerful, even absolute ones: The Sun King Louis XIV - a parade role for the Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud - suddenly feels pain in his leg after a walk in August 1715. He spent the next few days in his chamber, continuing government business in the best possible way and gradually gliding towards his death. A historical film as a chamber play.

Simultaneously, a retired couple overwhelmed by debt tries to win a dance contest, as the minister of economy is suspected of tax evasion, and a teenage girl encounters a sexual maniac, while a young lawyer attempts to climb the social ladder. When the shoe drops, the winner won’t necessarily be the one we expected.

Dreaming, falling, starting over. Margot and Alma are two best friends holding on to the energy of their youth and their burning desire to conquer the world, until life gets in the way. But their ride-or-die friendship can get them through anything; they are inseparable, unstoppable.

1971. Delphine, the daughter of farmers, moves to Paris to break free from the shackles of her family and to gain her financial independence. Carole is a Parisian, living with Manuel, actively involved in the stirrings of the feminist movement. Their encounter turns their lives upside down.

When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.

This is the story of a ball. A grand ball. Every summer, more than two thousand people come from accross Europe to dance together, dance even more, during seven days and seven nights, in the countryside of France. A joyful crowd of men and women from all ages, speaking different languages, beginners, virtuosos, enthusiasts. A crowd that reveals how different it is when we dare look into one's eyes, when we dare touch one another. And how life pounds.

«Francofonia» by Alexander Sokurow is the story of two remarkable men, Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and Nazi Occupation officer Count Wolff-Metternich - enemies then collaborators - whose alliance would be the driving force behind the preservation of museum treasures. «Francofonia» explores the relationship between art and power, the Louvre museum as a living example of civilization, and what art tells us about ourselves even in the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has ever seen.

Labidi’s Paris flat is so small that there is only room for one bed. The young writer, who has only published a short story so far, and his flatmate Alekseï alternate shifts sleeping in the bed and on a camping mat in front of it. In Lyon, where Labidi’s Tunisian-born mother runs a café with his father, Labidi meets freckle-faced drama student Elisa and immediately he wants to have it all: true love, total commitment and a grand moving in with each other. But his bank balance is the opposite of grand. His publisher is waiting for his first novel but, what with all the loving and part-time jobs, Labidi just can’t seem to make any progress. In his feature film debut, director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas takes on the classic themes of French New Wave cinema with unaffected charm and an assured touch. He has succeeded in creating a delightful portrait of a modern generation. These are people with and without a migrant background who meander through their everyday lives, caught between earning money and fulfilling their artistic goals, between intimacy and detachment, between nonchalance and despair, all while smoking – naturellement – one cigarette after another.

The RER B is an urban train that traverses Paris and its environs from north to south. Multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker Alice Diop takes us through these suburban spaces and confronts us with some of the faces and stories of which they are composed. A moving testament to the importance of filming as a process of bearing witness and remembering, «Nous» is timely in many ways. It is subtle and shrewd in a world that favours shortcuts and easy answers. Justifiably adopting the fragmented structure of a patchwork portrait in order to describe a riven society, Diop displays impressive control of her essay and its impact. In the film’s first few minutes, a deer is observed, through binoculars. A certain sense of awkward, man-made distance stays with us. Isolation, discrimination and nostalgia for hierarchies, inherited from a monarchical past … Divisions haunt France’s present. But the human urge to give as well as to receive stubbornly creeps into every situation, observed or triggered. Could this be the one thing that still keeps a nation together?