Na Zapad ou la fierté nationale d'un cristal de Bohême

A two-way mirror. Water and fire. Water extinguishes fire, and fire boils away water. There are many difficulties preventing them from understanding one another.

Traces the life of Anna Magnani, her creations, her successes, her triumphs, her boycotted career, her nonconformism, her anxieties, her generosity ... Punctuated with photos that tell her career in theater and cinema, Extracts of films, this documentary portrait also gives the floor to his friends and relatives, from Roberto Rossellini to Marcello Mastroianni, through Federico Fellini.

At 45, divorced, unemployed and father of two children, Franois Morot realizes that he can no longer support the society in which he lives and decides to leave everything.

Starting in Germany before crossing into Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, Vers la mer (To the Sea) is a documentary-voyage filmed in black-and-white by Annik Leroy, as she traces the River Danube from its source to the estuary of the Black Sea.

Samy Szlingerbaum made his film Dakh-Brisel (Brussels-Transit) in 1980, thirty years after any Yiddish feature film had been produced. Szlingerbaum felt that the only way he could relate the story of his family’s search for refuge after World War II was in Yiddish. This Belgian-based filmmaker, deeply impacted by New York experimental cinema, gives us a masterful blend of powerful drama and stark documentary to tell the story of postwar European Jewry. Home, as it had been, no longer exists, and all that Samy’s family wants is a place in which to sink new roots.

Drawing on the Arab heritage of oral tradition and mosaic pattern, Leila and the Wolves is an exploration of the collective memory of Arab women and their hidden role in history throughout the past half century both in Palestine and in Lebanon.

“With this film I try to retrace my journey, my story through the ruins, neighbourhoods, and streets of Berlin. I filmed the dialogue that took place between the city and myself, the wanderings in the old neighbourhoods (Moabit, Kreuzberg, Wedding), places where you can still find most of the traces of the past, or rather what’s left of them.” (AL)

A sensitivity to sounds coming from the activities of an unwelcome guest in the close quarters of an apartment is only one important component in this atmospheric, avant-garde drollery by Chantal Akerman. When the apartment owner comes home, her guest is settled in and at first, the slightly reclusive host decides simply to eat her breakfast in her room instead of having to face morning conversation with her guest. Sounds of the toilet flushing, the bath water running and splashing, footsteps pacing, and furniture moving invade the hostess' refuge in her bedroom like the frontrunners of an all-out offensive. She locks herself up for 28 days, life's detritus accumulating around her, just so she does not have to go out to face the nemesis that lurks beyond her door.

A short film using parts of the storyboard drawings for Fritz Lang's Man Hunt given to the French Cinémathèque to recreate a scene to showcase a part of the directors' creative process.