Life Beyond Me

A commissioned short film about the AIDS crisis in France in the late 1990s.

Danielle (Bernadette Lafont), a grandmother in her sixties, is planning to take her two grandchildren to their father’s house for the Easter vacation. Since retiring as a schoolteacher, Danielle has regularly taken on this responsibility after her daughter’s divorce. This time, however, the children’s father is not there to welcome them, giving Danielle the opportunity to spend a bit more time with her grandchildren and to take them out for the day. Jumping at every opportunity presented to them, Danielle soon transforms this day-outing into an impromptu holiday. Only what starts out as a fun adventure gradually turns into an inexorable deconstructing experience, and it soon becomes impossible for Danielle to contemplate taking the kids back…

An author returns to his hometown of Cognac for the first time in 35 years to help promote a distillery. Once there, he meets his first love’s son, Lucas. Memories come rushing back to him: irrepressible attraction, bodies becoming one in the heat of desire, a passion that can never be revealed… His first love’s name was Thomas. They were 17.

March 11, 2011. The biggest tsunami Japan has ever experienced triggers the Fukushima disaster. Risks are being downplayed but the foreign community in Tokyo is terrified by this tragic event and the fact that no one is capable of assessing its scope. Among them, Alexandra, a French executive newly arrived from Hong Kong to work in a bank, has to face this nuclear crisis. Torn apart between fol- lowing the company’s instructions and going back to her husband and children who are still in Hong Kong, she will find herself defending honor and given word, despite the pervading terror and chaos.

After her son is killed in a terrorist attack, French-Moroccan Latifa becomes an influential activist striving to prevent such attacks. In this documentary, we follow Latifa as she travels France with unstinting energy, discussing integration, racism and of course Islam. Emotions at times run high.

What is striking when you talk with mathematicians is that sparkle in their eyes, and their sudden joyful voice trying to share with you a concept, a theory. They continuously use words such as invention, beauty, freedom. You then ask yourself : how such a rich language, this quasi-philosophical proposition about the world becomes rejected by a majority, 'the only discipline where one prides itself to be bad at it'!