To Paint or Make Love

How can we create an image of our parents that respects their privacy—that is, the mystery of each individual—while simultaneously conveying the depth of the bond and/or what has been passed down? Our parents are first and foremost the people with whom we have lived. The color of memories is inseparable from the places they evoke, and there is always a house nearby. If we retrace our steps and consider these houses in the present, a wealth of stories emerges, and we learn much about their inhabitants: who they are, who they aspire to be, who they once were. How our parents live, or have lived, is also how they inhabit us.

"We don't travel for the pleasure of traveling, as far as I know; we're fools, but not that foolish" (Samuel Beckett). A girl, a boy, Venice.

A shy computer expert falls in love with a beautiful colleague while trying to become a film director. Five years later, they have two children, she has become a successful executive, his career has gone nowhere, and their relationship is coming to an end.

An unemployed man whose girlfriend is cheating on him decides to travel to the town of Lourdes with friends.

They imagine it, sense it, hear it, and see it—the mountain, they, the hikers.

Aymeric runs into Florence, a former coworker, one evening in Saint-Claude in the Haut-Jura. She is six months pregnant and single. When she gives birth to Jim, Aymeric is there. They spend happy years together until Christophe, Jim's biological father, shows up... It could be the start of a melodrama, it's also the start of an odyssey into fatherhood.

Roland, a young father, decided to climb a famous mountain gap whose name he bears, in the company of his wife and two teenage children.

During the height of summer, Caroline, a forty-year-old Parisian and mother, arrives in a small village in the south of France. She must hastily organize the funeral of her mother, a flighty lawyer, whom she barely used to see. Caroline is welcomed by Pattie, who likes to talk about her love affairs with the local men to anyone who'll listen. Then, while the whole valley gets ready for the traditional mid-summer dance, Caroline's mother's corpse mysteriously disappears...

A 48-year-old homeless singer and composer receive a cryptic message that makes him believe he has been visited by the Virgin Mary.

Marc, in his 40s, is a professor of literature at the University of Lausanne. Still a bachelor — and still living with his sister Marianne in a huge, isolated chalet that they inherited when they were very young — he carries on one love affair after another with his students. Winter has almost ended when one of his most brilliant students, Barbara, suddenly disappears. Two days later, Marc meets Barbara’s mother, Anna, who wants to find out more about her vanished daughter.

Robinson, appropriately named as we will soon discover, is on vacation in Biarritz with his wife. What follows is the story behind the loss of his arm, a story that becomes increasingly bizarre and eventually apocalyptic, leading us down a narrative path of labyrinthine complexity. The resulting film is an extraordinary feat of imagination and daring, set against the backdrop of a world on the verge of destruction.

Edouard, unemployed computer technician, invites Diana, a young student from England, to spend a weekend in the Noire Mountain. At dusk, they arrive at Gilbert’s place. A former 60’s activist who lives in the forest, Gilbert has decided to drop everything and to offer Edouard his house. Edouard accepts the offer, tries to convince Diana to stay, and discovers that, perhaps, Gilbert is his father.

Getting away from it all causes more problems than it solves in this comedy from the French writing-directing team of Jean-Marie Larrieu and Arnaud Larrieu. Alexandre Darou (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and his wife Aurore Lalu (Sabine Azema) are a pair of well-known actors who need a break from the tension and fast pace of their lives in show biz. Adopting the names "Mr. and Mrs. Go," Alexandre and Aurore head for a village high in the mountains of Southwest France, where they hope to enjoy some relaxing downtime and they won't be bothered. However, Alexandre and Aurore underestimated their own fame, and it isn't long before everyone in the town knows that a pair of movie stars are in their midst. As the couple head into the hills, Alexandre and Aurore discover they don't have much of a talent for roughing it, and while she believed that getting away from the city would help her deal with a recent bout with nymphomania, getting back to nature only increases her appetite for other men.

A portrait of the Larrieu brothers at work shot during the post-production of their film Tralala.