Martin Rit

An author returns to his hometown of Cognac for the first time in 35 years to help promote a distillery. Once there, he meets his first love’s son, Lucas. Memories come rushing back to him: irrepressible attraction, bodies becoming one in the heat of desire, a passion that can never be revealed… His first love’s name was Thomas. They were 17.

One night, three young men shoot the owners of a hunting lodge. The man who hired them claims he only asked them to do one thing: scare the people who were resisting him. How do you come to kill when you're barely twenty and there's no war going on?

In a Parisian public hospital, Claire Simon questions what it means to live in women’s bodies, filming their diversity, singularity and their beauty in all stages throughout life. Unique stories of desires, fears and struggles unfold, including the one of the filmmaker herself.

The Inspection is a mighty film without (luckily) any morality in the end — it is a story about what can and what cannot be told to children. A school teacher receives a visit from an educational inspector, who is trying to coherently react to the parents’ complaints. It turns out she spends too much time telling children about the horrible events of the 20th century, in particular about the Holocaust — all in contradiction to the logically drawn school curriculum. She is deeply convinced that while one cannot talk too much about the genocide of the European Jews, it is way too easy not to say enough, not to warn and not to explain.

A car drives along the French coasts. Inside, a father takes his daughter to Paris to begin her student life, a new life in an unknown city, far from her childhood and far from him. This one to one journey is their first, maybe their last. Nothing seems exceptional but both of them know they'll have to say goodbye.

Mehdia, an Ethiopian migrant domestic worker in Beirut, loves Ahmed, a Syrian refugee who struggles to survive dealing in second-hand metal scraps, while affected by a mysterious physical condition related to shrapnel wounds exposure during the war. Their love story seems to have no future, but since they have nothing, they can lose nothing. When the opportunity presents itself, they leave Beirut in a hopeful and desperate get-away while Ahmed’s physical condition gets worse and worse.

Natacha (25), a young single parent who works as a fast-food waitress, struggles to raise her 8-year-old son Enzo. Torn between a strong desire for independence and the comfort that her mother Irène unfailingly wants to provide for them, Natacha feels trapped. Her encounter with Walid, who is waiting to save enough money to pay for his crossing to England will open new horizons for her.

Nora, 26, is a graduate and still lives with her parents. While Nora has no field experience, she finds herself in charge of a 19-year-old boy, accused of having murdered a girl from his residence. From her first police custody to the follow-up of the instruction, Nora discovers the cruelty of the world around her, in her intimate and professional life. Soon, carried away by the frenzy of her new life, she multiplies the errors.