The Mother and the Whore

A family portrait in which the director profiles his grandmother, Odette Robert. Eustache includes in the film the conditions of its production — he is seated at the table with her, pours her some whiskey, speaks with the camera operator, manipulates the clapboard at the head and tail of the reels, and even takes a phone call. Robert, who was seventy-one, speaks rapidly and tells the story of her life, starting from her early childhood in villages in the Bordeaux region of France. A shorter version of the film ("Odette Robert") was edited in 1980 to be broadcast on television on TF1. The complete film only gained exposure in 2002, when it was salvaged by Boris Eustache, Thierry Lounas, João Bénard da Costa, Jean-Marie Straub, and Pedro Costa.

Second in the documentary trilogy from mastermind Jacques Rivette, featuring a conversation between Jean Renoir and Michel Simon, who celebrate their reunion by discussing, among other things, La Chienne (1931) and Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932).

Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.

In 1979, under the presidency of the city mayor, the people of Pessac elect a virtuous and gracious maiden from amongst the residents, following a tradition that comes from times immemorial.

Daniel needs some money to buy a duffle coat that is in fashion, so he agrees to work for a photographer by dressing up as Santa Claus. He discovers that it is much easier to meet girls when he is in his costume.

Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.

Filmed by Jean Eustache for the television program, Les Enthousiastes, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights presents a series of unstructured observations, free associations, and interpretations on the third panel of Bosch's well-known oil on wood triptych.

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.

Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after a year of high school, goes to live with his mother in the south of France; a harsher environment which rapidly changes his perception of friends, work, and women.

A journey in the company of Bernadette Lafont, French Cinema’s most atypical actress. Tracing her career from pin-up girl, to New Wave model of sexual freedom, to drug-dealing granny in the film Paulette, by way of La Fiancée du Pirate and Les Stances à Sophie, this film pays tribute to her extraordinary life and artistic odyssey. Her grand-daughters, Anna, Juliette and Solène, revisit the dreams of Bernadette, in the family home in the Cevennes region where they, like her, grew up. Her close friends, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon, reminisce on their artistic and human complicity. Throughout the film, Bernadette Lafont in person, with her inimitable character actress voice, re-evokes a life in cinema marked with insolence, courage and freedom.

Alix Cléo Roubaud, a photographer, describes her images to Eustache’s son Boris. An “essay in the shape of a hoax”, Eustache’s last film wittily questions the relationship between showing and telling as it gradually shifts Alix’s narration out of sync with what we see.

This satire concerns three French singing idols and their attempt to stay in the public eye. A press conference, backstage hedonism, psychedelia, manipulative managers and disc jockeys are portrayed as the pop culture is thoroughly and effectively lampooned in this independent feature.

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

A group of friends listen as one man tells them a story about a time when, in a small cafe, he discovered a peephole into the ladies' bathroom and became addicted to looking through it at female genitals. They ask him questions and come to conclusions about sex. This is a filmed, scripted version. Then, the actual person who this happened to relates the same story; this time, however, it is an unscripted documentary, in which the same things occur as in the scripted one.

The intense and twisted relationship between a man and a woman in a bizarre wilderness, as a seductress accompanies a gunslinger fleeing from a posse.