Louis Gardel

In colonial Vietnam, dashing French naval captain Jean-Baptiste, wealthy plantation owner Éliane Devries, and her adopted Vietnamese daughter Camillevare form the three points of a cross-cultural romantic triangle. As the struggle against European imperialism sweeps Indochina, Jean-Baptiste and Camille have to choose sides and Éliane faces the emotionally difficult challenge of raising the child of her daughter and ex-lover.

In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.

As the denizens of a Tibetan village prepare for their arduous annual trek to exchange salt for grain, the community's allegiances are split between aging chieftain Tinle and rebellious young Karma. Tinle tries to maintain his clout and preserve obedience to ancient customs when Karma challenges the old man's power.

June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.

A Turkish consul travels to a Soviet city in the worst times of Stalinism. There, he falls in love with his secretary, a fervent communist.

In Dieppe, a taciturn young man is fascinated by a woman whom he has only seen in the street. One day, he leaves Dieppe and Lola, the girl he was living with. He becomes a truck-driver. In the Middle East, Christian's travels end in a prison in the heart of the desert. There he meets Eliot who lives an isolated life within the prison environment. Since Eliot talks, Christian who was mute up to that point, listens then speaks too. But Eliot receives letters from a woman: Marie. And Christian starts dreaming that she's the woman he saw on the streets of Dieppe.

The writer Louis Gardel remembers his youth in Algeria. In 1955, Louis is 15 years old and lives with his grandmother Zoé. Zoé is friend with president Steiger, leader of the French settlers but also with the old Arab Bouarab. One night looking at the Bay of Algiers, Louis is convinced that the world in which he has grown will disappear. The first events of the War of Independence have begun. The young boys and young girls have a good time at the seaside: swimming, dancing, flirting. But, little by little, the war becomes part of their daily life.

Loosely based on Diégo Brosset’s novel, set in the Sahara at the beginning of the twentieth century. A man of the desert is adopted by some hunters and becomes a highly respected guide while trying to escape colonization.

A veteran of the Indochina war, a doctor emigrated to Kabylia. He is torn between his love for the sister of a rebel group and his duty as a patriot.

France, 1940. German troops have just invaded the country, but in the rural idyll of the family chateau inhabited by 20-year-old Mellie with her impoverished aristocrat father Alexandre and adolescent cousin Robinson, the war still seems far away, apart from the fact that Mellie's rich and unpopular fiancé André has been drafted into the army. For Robinson and his friends the same age, including the temperamental Bertrand, the war is merely a game they play in the remoteness of the blue island in the lake.

The enigmatic but vivid imagery of this loosely plotted film is based on a similarly evocative novel by the Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, Noturno Indiano. An old friend of the hero's has been living in Bombay with a prostitute. His friend Peter Schlemihl (Otto Tausig) is a concentration camp survivor, who went to India after being captivated by a photograph he saw there. When the prostitute writes to him in Europe asking that he rescue his friend from a mysterious malaise, he flies into India to try and help. When he gets to Bombay, he discovers that his friend has disappeared. Following the clues left behind by the friend, and based on his acquaintance with him, he journeys to Madras to speak to a Theosophist dignitary there, and then journeys on to Portugues Goa. With each step of his journey, the hero (Jean-Hugues Anglade) becomes more identified with his friend, and re-enacts in his own person the transformations he must have experienced.

The story takes us from the dear Garrigue to the secondary school where Marcel is first ill at ease because he is a scholarship holder and because he went to the grade school (the other bourgeois pupils had probably a private tutor). A fight against a rich kid ,that augurs badly for what is to follow. (to be followed in "Le Temps des Amours" )

The last episode of Pagnol's memories (see also "La Gloire de Mon Père" "le Château de Ma Mère" and "Le Temps des secrets") deals with the teenage years of Marcel. While always spending his Summers in his dear Garrigue, he is now on the way to the Baccalaureat. He 's got a good pal Lagneau (The Lamb) who of course infuriates the teachers when he "bleats"...

The story of Napoleon Bonaparte's grandniece, the famous Princess Marie, her friendship and her work with Sigmund Freud.

The love story of two youths during the 1700s. Fabrizio, a boy who was supposed to be a noble and part of Napoleons army, and Clelia a beautiful girl from an important noble family of high society Parma. Their love became impossible because of the interference of other characters with personal desires.

At the battle of Solferino Joseph von Trotta, a lieutenant in the Slovenian infantry, is wounded while saving the life of the young Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph I. The Emperor rewards him by elevating him in society to a position quite out of keeping with his social rank, and which entirely alienates him from his farming background: Joseph gets promoted to the rank of captain, and is made a member of the nobility. Years later Joseph von Trotta accidentally finds a description of the battle that changed his life in a text-book belonging to his son Franz. Enraged at the over-emotional, patriotic and sentimental way in which the Emperor's rescue at the hands of "the Hero of Solferino" is depicted, he lodges a complaint at the Imperial Court.