World Language Resources

André Demester leaves his farm in northern France to become a soldier in a far off land. On his last night of freedom he witnesses Barbe, his childhood friend and secret love, sleeping with another man. A twist of fate puts the two men side by side in combat where their undeclared personal war and the one they are fighting tragically merge. Left behind, Barbe, alone and wasting away, faces misfortunes of her own, while awaiting the soldiers’ return.

Acclaimed master Raoul Ruiz’s dark comedy is based on the case of Hermine van Hug, a 1920s psychoanalyst who believes that criminal tendencies are formed at age five and who labeled her nephew a murderer before he reached adolescence. Ruiz’s film is an intelligent, darkly comic meditation on family, free will, and the nature of the criminal mind. Catherine Deneuve is compelling and radiant playing two roles as both victim and… killer?

Agnès Varda, Grande Dame of the French New Wave, has made 2001's most acclaimed non-fiction film-a self-described "wandering-road documentary." Beginning with the famous Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, she focuses her ever-seeking eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads us from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism. Varda's own ruminations on her life as a filmmaker (a gleaner of sorts) give her a connection to her subjects that creates a touching human portrait that the L.A. Weekly deemed "a protest film that's part social critique, part travelogue, but always an unsentimental celebration of human resilience."

Jean Renoir's pacifist masterpiece stars Jean Gabin as a French World War I POW held by Erich Von Stroheim's German captain. One of the greatest antiwar films ever made, as well as a rousing prison-escape adventure, Grand Illusion is an exemplar of the 1930s poetic realist movement.

When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentments at their social marginalization slowly simmering until they reach a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.

A cornerstone of French cinema, Alain Resnais' first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award®-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork

Catherine Deneuve stars in this Oscar-winning tale of passion and revolution in colonial Vietnam. Deneuve stars as Eliane Devries, the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina. Her steely exterior, however, is only a mask intended to hide her torrid love affairs from upper-class society. But when her adopted Indochinese daughter innocently falls in love with Eliane’s secret lover, the scandalous lovers’ triangle threatens to destroy their entire family. A sensual story of unbridled passion set against the violence of the bloody Communist uprising, Indochine is a historically accurate, emotionally wrenching epic of love and war.

"When Driss an ex-con from the projects is hired to take care of an eccentric French aristocrat named Philippe his newfound job quickly becomes an unpredictable adventure." -- Amazon.com.

Juliette Fontaine (Kristin Scott Thomas, Golden Globe Nominee for I've Loved You So Long, Oscar nominee for The English Patient) is a frail, haunted woman, an ex-doctor who's a shell of her former self. Having served 15 years in prison for an unspeakable crime, she's back on the "outside." With nowhere else to go, she comes to live with her loving but estranged sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein). Together the sisters embark on a painful but redemptive journey back from life's darkest edge in this gripping drama of struggle and salvation

In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, legendary director François Truffaut’s early masterpiece Jules and Jim charts the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession over the course of twenty-five years. Jeanne Moreau stars as Catherine, the alluring and willful young woman whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into on of cinema's most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, "Jules & Jim" was a worldwide smash upn its release in 1962 and remains as audacious and entrancing today.