Ciné regards: Tess: Roman Polanski

On May 21, 1975, the trial of the members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) began. Four members appeared before the Stuttgart court to answer for the attacks that had been raging for five years in the young Federal Republic of Germany. The documentary, whose title is borrowed from Berthold Brecht's In Praise of Dialectics, recounts the conditions of the trials and detention of the Baader-Meinhof Gang members and the disqualification of Klaus Croissant as their lawyer.

On April 24th, 1982, when Orson Welles was invited to Paris to receive the Légion d'honneur from François Mitterand, a lively filmed interview took place inside the French Cinémathèque.

Serge Daney, the most influential film critic after André Bazin, interviewed by Régis Debray a few months before his death.

The eight-hour series of interviews between Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, filmed by Pierre-André Boutang in 1988-1989.

A haunting short version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous story about a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on a victim of the Spanish Inquisition...

Two old ladies live in a French chateau. When one of them dies, her sister, who lives in Moscow, inherits the property, which soon ends up in the hands of Japanese businessmen.

A banker hires a seedy detective to find his daughter and keep her safe from kidnappers.

It is a brief documentary which records the life of five Augustinian monks in the little monastery of Castelnuovo dell'Abate, a Tuscan village, as well as the everyday life of people in the small town, from farmers to meat-hackers, from wine-makers to wild boar hunters.

In what way can reflecting on worlds very far from our own, either in space or time, bear relevance for us today? Is there a scientific legacy - a before and after Lévi-Strauss - in anthropology? This documentary retraces the intellectual path of the author of "Tristes tropiques" ("A World on the Wane") and "La Pensée sauvage" ("The Savage Mind"), Claude Lévi-Strauss. The anthropologist and founder of structural anthropology in France is portrayed via numerous selected extracts of interviews he has given since the 1960s. The film is a fascinating introduction into the mind of a man who is interested in all men. Lévi-Strauss has great confidence (in spite of a pessimistic view of our contemporary world) in the creative capacities of the human mind.

A French documentary charting the life of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso through the events of 13 significant days of his life, including his marriage to Olga Kokhlova, the birth of his daughter, the bombing of Guernica and the death of Stalin. Archive footage of Picasso, his lover Françoise Gilot, writer Jean Cocteau, photographer Brassat and critic Pierre Daix is accompanied by new interviews with Picasso's daughter Maya and son Claude.

Henri Langlois, interviewed in the Cinema Museum at the Palais de Chaillot, talks about his vision of cinema's past, present and future, before a brief jaunt through the museum as it was in 1975.

On December 2, 1987, the filmmaker visited the novelist at her home in Paris. This meeting gave rise to this hour-long documentary in which JLG and Marguerite Duras attempt to establish a dialogue about artistic creation.