Gérard Frot-Coutaz

Nine short films about love.

The fortunes of a small theatrical company based in the Paris suburbs.

In this romantic farce, former opera-singer and current music festival organizer Hermance (Judith Magre) is married to Charles-Henry (Jean Roquel). However, she still has a passion for her former lover Simon (Carlo Brandt), but he has a thing for Francoise (Sabine Haudepin). Meanwhile, Nathalie (Tonie Marshall) keeps trying to put the moves on Hippolyte (Jacques Bonnafe), who is either unaware of or is ignoring her efforts, while her lackluster former lover Christian (Michel Gauthier) looks on and stays out of the whole mess. Who comes out the worst in this deal? Naturally enough, it's Christian, the fellow who has, for good or ill, kept the most distance from it, when Hermance, who seems jealous of everyone, tries to get even with Simon for running off with Francoise. Don't worry, it's supposed to be confusing.

Simone, a leather-clad porn theater worker, spends her shifts bantering with her coworker and observing eccentric customers in the cinema’s lobby. Tonight, she clocks out and heads off to meet her girlfriend, a waitress at a lesbian club. Later, she’ll encounter a lonely man on the prowl.

A compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.

Camille, a young, provincial, proletarian man works for Hélène Courtray, who is still beautiful and seductive. She's a sophisticated, cultivated and well-to-do woman who has engaged him to care for her reclusive son who has spent the past few years voluntarily locked up in his room. An encounter between two persons and two worlds where the relationship of the young man to this closed, strange and unknown universe rapidly turns tragedy.

A woman returns after twenty years to Toulon where her husband, who collaborated with the nazis, was murdered. Her motives are unclear.

This slice-of-life drama about an elderly couple and their estranged son covers twenty-four fateful hours that begin with the usual daily routine for the retired pair of former teachers (Micheline Presle and Claude Pieplu). Then their son telephones to say he will be coming over with his girlfriend and the normal pattern is changed, as he visits them rarely. While the mother is obsequious to her son when he arrives, past hurts and resentments bubble up during lunch, making it difficult for the son to tell them he is getting married. This is news enough, but the effect that announcement has on the son and his fiancée is unexpected and events later on in the day take a turn for the worse.