Richard Copans

Mourning his boyfriend Frédéric's death from an overdose, the French filmmaker David Teboul goes to Siberia on a ritual journey. Out here, under the enormous dome of the skies, he finds the free space to disentangle his thoughts again. And in the villages, both young and old people unexpectedly turn out to be prepared to respond to his invitation to talk about an event that changed their lives. Life, death, love and existence.

The 1984 short Barres celebrates the ingenious ways one can get onto the Paris Metro without paying.

"Bania" is an exploration Russian society through its bath-houses in the city, the countryside, in a monastery, a factory or a prison. The film plays with the boundaries between personal and social space in scenes where naked bodies, marked by tattoos, suffering, labour or war, tell a tale. This film was made by a photographer who, confronted by these naked bodies bathed in steam, invents an unique and timeless plastic world, in the style of classical painting.

Paris, North Station, anything comes by, even trains. One would like to stay, but they have to hurry up... Like other thousands lives crossing, Ismael, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan are going to meet here...

Amos Gitai explores the international traffic in contract labor through parallel movements of Thai women in the sex trade and men migrating to the Gulf states. Through interviews and observational footage, the film exposes the economic forces and human consequences shaping lives across borders.

A filmmaker, armed with a small digital camera, discovers a city through a handful of characters acting as guides. He entrusts the task of narrating the city entirely to its own inhabitants. Whether these guides are famous or anonymous matters less than their unique talent for making their surroundings feel less foreign to us. Thanks to their intersecting paths, the city’s singular identity gradually emerges from this collage of subjective sequences.

A trip to the seaside campsites, along the coast from Spain to the Camargue, like the other side of society, a cleverly mixed deck of cards. Each time the filmmaker pitches his tent, he gets to know his neighbors. And, as is often the case in these cases, they tell a stranger what they wouldn't tell their relatives. They talk about themselves, about what matters to them.

A group of educators led by Fernand Deligny are working to create contact with autistic children in a hamlet of the Cevennes.

Two young girls find out, in the hard way, that climb mountains isn't all that fun that people often say it is.

The film intertwines historical events and intimate memories. I observe how architecture represents the transformations of society and those who give form to this architecture. We follow the journey of Munio, my father, born in 1909 in Silesia, Poland, the son of a tenant farmer of a Prussian junker. At the age of 18, Munio goes to Berlin and Dessau to meet Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus. In 1933, the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, who accused Munio of treason against the German people. Munio was imprisoned, then deported to Basel. He left for Palestine. Upon his arrival in Haifa, he began a career as an architect and adapted European modernist principles to the Middle East.

Hervé Le Roux discovered a short film about a strike in a battery factory. Now he's looking for one of the workers seen in this film: a young woman who is very, very angry.

In a small town in northern Algeria during the 1990s, at the height of the dark decade that tore the country apart, three unemployed young men navigate the daily lives of life, caught between endless boredom and the anticipation of the improbable, between humor and despair. This documentary bears witness to an era from which Algeria has managed to recover, once again facing alone attempts at external destabilization, the devaluation of its local currency by the World Bank, and the interference and pressure of international financial lobbies.

Sylvain Berg, a "professional" unemployed who spends his time hiking and mountain climbing, and "model" bank employee Benoît Constant, who has just been fired and does not want his wife to find out, both find themselves in Françoise Duru's office at an employment agency. Françoise is secretly in love with Sylvain, so in order to keep him close she convinces her employer to give Sylvain a job he doesn't want, instead of Benoit who not only wants it but also has the right qualifications.

An account of the life and work of the influential Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), an iconic figure and a godless demigod who dared to enter the darkest depths of the human mind; through his correspondence and his own voice, and that of his family and friends.

A voyage into the museum's reserves, and part of the extra work involved to mount the expositions after the renovation of the Louvre in the 1980s, when the glass pyramid was added to the classic buildings. From the preservation rooms through the frame and painting retouches by experts, to the personnel instruction on how to be efficient in protecting the collections, and look nice to the visitors.

“You buy a book. You don’t really know why. It lies around, and then one day you open it, almost absentmindedly. And there you are, facing your own innermost secrets.” So begins Stan Neumann’s cinematic adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel, Austerlitz. The vaulted and majestic space of the railway station in Antwerp is where our journey really starts with actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) addressing the camera directly, and musing on the curious nature of railway stations. This bravura opening is startling, charming, and like the unnamed narrator of the book, you surrender to the proceedings and perambulate alongside Lavant, as he journeys through the great buildings of Europe, faded and shuttered hotels and grand colonnades with broken windows.

Located on the île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, the Paris Law Court looks like an impenetrable fortress. Like Kafka’s castle, it guards its secrets well. It is the place of power. The filmmaker, who worked there for several years as a crime reporter, is extremely familiar with its labyrinthine spaces, its practices, its ceremonies. She comes back to it now, while the Courthouse, such as she knows it, is about to disappear: its relocation is planned in 2017. So, she explores it, camera in hand, on the traces of her experience.

One hundred and twenty years of film history in a warehouse in Paris. In the reserves of the French Cinematheque, where thousands of cameras and projectors are sleeping on the shelves. Thousands of stationary machinery, we dream of getting back to work as a great machine back in time. To tell their story, the material history of cinema.

A documentary about Che Guevara in Bolivia, based upon his journal listing daily agendas

In this creatively organized story of one "delinquent," director Patrick Chaput has put together a well-paced drama/thriller set in part against the dark by-ways of Paris. Seventeen-year-old Daniel grew up in foster homes in a rural area and those years contrast with his later youth in Paris. A filmmaker opts to interview Daniel for a documentary on delinquency, and that is how the young man's past and precarious present start coming to light.

Resorting to the images that make up three quarters of the last century, Jean-Louis Comolli chose films that crossed his path fifty years ago, discovering his own history of cinema, and particularly the documentary cinema. Visual score orchestrated by a voice off (his) which lists topics that are important to him - the place of the viewer, the fiction in the documentary, the impact of technical progress on the artistic field ... -, the film weaves unpredictable wires between the excerpts .

An ongoing series of films devoted to the most remarkable achievements in modern architecture, from the works that heralded the birth of the modern style at the end of the 19th century to the latest designs from today's top architects. By examining each building in detail, the series brings to light the role each has played in the history and evolution of architecture.