Emmanuel Finkiel

Part-time model Valentine unexpectedly befriends a retired judge after she runs over his dog. At first, the grumpy man shows no concern about the dog, and Valentine decides to keep it. But the two form a bond when she returns to his house and catches him listening to his neighbors’ phone calls.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

In the first of the three linked episodes of French writer-director Emmanuel Finkiel’s delicate, poignant Voyages, a bus tour of Poland, by present-day French survivors of the Holocaust, suffers a mishap: en route to Auschwitz from a Jewish cemetery, the bus breaks down. In the second episode, one of them confronts the possibility that her father, long presumed to be among the Six Million, in fact survived; but is he her father?

The wife of a famous composer survives a car accident that kills her husband and daughter. Now alone, she shakes off her old identity and explores her newfound freedom but finds that she is unbreakably bound to other humans, including her husband’s mistress, whose existence she never suspected.

5 short films on the theme of European identity.

A ruthless real estate agent discovers a passion for piano and auditions with help from a young virtuoso, but the pressures of his corrupt career threaten to derail his musical aspirations.

In the darkest days of the Second World War, Yulia and Hugo, a Jewish mother and son, escape from a Ukrainian ghetto. Fearing for his safety, Yulia entrusts her boy to the care of her friend Mariana, a sex worker who lives in a brothel. Hugo is placed in a closet, nominally for his safety, but from which he rarely leaves. With little view of the outside world, he conjures up ghosts and scenarios. But over time, Mariana brings the boy out and in doing so transforms his life.

Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?