Pierre Banderet

The future of Marguerite, a brilliant student in Mathematics at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, seems all planned out. The only woman from her year, Marguerite is finishing a thesis she has to present to an audience of researchers. On the big day, a mistake shakes all her certainties and all her foundations collapse.

Jeannette is a single mother living in a working-class community in Marseilles; she tries to support herself and her two kids on her salary as a check-out girl at a supermarket and lives in an apartment complex where everyone is thrown into close proximity with everyone else. Marius is working as a security guard at a cement factory that has gone out of business; he's also squatting in the building, since the plant is soon to be demolished and he'll be needing his money later on. One day, Jeannette happens by the factory, and spotting several cans of paint, tries to take two of them home with her. Marius spots her and tries to chase her away, while she rails at him with curses against the capitalist system. The next day, an apologetic Marius appears at her doorstep, cans of paint in hand; the two soon become friendly, and a romance begins to bloom, though it quickly becomes obvious that Jeannette's romance novel fantasies are a bit off the mark from what Marius has in mind.

A dark tale of working-class life in Marseilles, a city in crisis. Interesting characters include a hard-bitten but compassionate fish market worker with a drug addicted daughter and a moody bartender with a shocking secret life.

Two scriptwriter friends with opposing personalities fuss and fight as they cobble together a script for a modern political film. Their arguments seem endless, they constantly stray from the plot, but the story slowly takes shape around garage mechanics at Moliterno & co. who fight a multinational in order to save their business.

In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.

From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.

A group of children from the same neighborhood meet a few years later. When the day comes, they meet again and take stock of their lives.

Wednesday is the day when children are not in school and stay at home. It is also the day when the parents are not there. In Nantes, in the spring, twenty or so carefree and boisterous kids between the ages of three and eleven take advantage of this day to make their parents go crazy. Emma, 9 years old and naturally romantic, decides that Roland, the little boy she met in the street, is unhappy and persuades her friends to adopt him. Victoria spends the day with Martin Socoa, an often distant father whom she learns to love. There are also Muriel, Bruno, Colette and Henri who take off and create panic in their parents' home, while Marylin lives the founding drama of her childhood with a mother of an unreal sweetness. Throughout these little stories, we realize that the world of children has its own logic, totally different from that of adults.