Valérie Dréville

A novelist attends the trial of a woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by abandoning her to the rising tide on a beach in northern France. But as the trial continues, her own family history, doubts, and fears about motherhood are steadily dislodged as the life story of the accused is gradually revealed.

In this whimsical fable, Resnais deftly interweaves three story lines: the creation of an early-20th-century utopia; romantic high jinks at a school conference; and a fantasy sparked by F/X pioneer Georges Méliès.

A woman involved with a terrorist group becomes dangerously close to the police officer guarding the bank they plan to rob.

A journalist tries to balance the duties of marriage and motherhood while researching a piece on college women who work as prostitutes to pay their tuition.

Professor Henri Laborit uses three people's stories to discuss behaviourist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety: René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing; Janine is a self-educated actress/stylist who learns that the wife of her lover is dying and must decide to let them reunite; and Jean is a controversial career-climbing writer/politician at a crossroads in life.

David Zimmerman, almost 40, is a photographer but no one knows it. When friends drag him to a wild party, he spots a woman in the crowd and can’t take his eyes off her, he follows her… A few hours later, David wakes up: he’s in the body of the unknown woman.

Set in 1913, 1936 and 2001. When he returns to the casino and seaside resort of his early teens, Louis, a 78 year old man encounters Olivia, a 19 year old young woman madly in love with a violent cad. Louis tells the story of his own mother having a passionate, driven fling with his Italian tennis instructor in 1936, and of Marie Collins Brown, the slightly older widowed woman who helped him through his confusion and pain by recounting the story of her passionate 24 hour fling with a hopeless young Polish gambler in 1913.

During a book signing in Normandy, Annie Ernaux, 70, revisits her memories of the summer of 1958, when she was 17. That summer, she left her hometown to work as a camp counsellor. At the first party, the head counsellor set out to deflower her. Finding him handsome, she lets him do it, as if against her will... Her body becomes a foreign place for her, an offering to be sacrificed.