Through the Mill

Three episodes from the history of socialism: Babeuf, whose virulent discourse is a radical assessment of the bourgeois revolution of 1789 (Vincent Nordon episode); the legend of Napoleon I, or the formation of the state as it still dominates today (François Barat episode); and the carnage of the Paris Commune, which official history strives to repress and forget (Joël Farges episode). What does it mean to make a historical film today? It means illuminating the present in the light of the past, and therefore adopting the new modes of modern storytelling to challenge what dominates us, structures us, and oppresses us.

Brittany is ethnically rather different from the rest of France and is the home of the largest number of Celtic-speakers outside of the British Isles and Ireland. This French film follows one young man who leaves his Breton homeland and journeys to Paris with the intention of living there. Despite some success in finding work and friends, Paris is not home and the Parisians are not family, so he returns to work with his own people.

Gérard Mordillat and Christophe Clerc interview 14 researchers from different countries and cultures about the notion of property. Where does it come from? How does it apply today to issues of the body, intelligence, and nature?

While researching their subject’s life for their feature My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud, co-directors/writers Gerard Mordillat and Jerome Prieur made a documentary on the famed French actor/writer/poet that died in 1948 at the age of 51.

The documentary series "Travail, salaire, profit" (work, salary, profit) takes us into the mysteries of the global economy, which is often too opaque to grasp all the ins and outs. Gérard Mordillat and Bertrand Rothé interview 21 researchers from around the world - economists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers - on the fundamental concepts of the economy: work, employment, wages, capital, profit and the market.

The French military is known for its draconian treatment of soldiers who desert or otherwise tangibly register disagreements with official policy. In this movie the story takes place during the Algerian War (late 1950s). Alain (Luc Thullier) is a deserter who has been sent back to the front lines as a member of a special disciplinary battalion. Such battalions are given only the most dangerous assignments, and most of the soldiers in them are expected to die in combat. As his unit skirmishes with the enemy, it suffers many losses until Alain is the only one left. Freed from supervision once more, he escapes again, this time to Tunisia, with the intention of trying to inform the French public about what is really happening in Algeria.

The epic story of the emergence of Christianity in just over a century, from the death of Jesus of Nazareth, around the year 30, to the moment when the leaders and followers of the new faith, already scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Jerusalem to Rome, are definitely moving away from Judaism, around the year 150.

During the German occupation of France, a young woman - Marie - finds a Jewish boy in her room. His parents and other Jewish neighbors have been just been deported, but Maurice (the boy) escaped. Marie decides to hide him, secretly.

Jacques Lemonnier of IBM France, Francois Dalle of L'Oreal and other ultrapowerful French moguls are surprisingly candid -- and cold-blooded -- as they discuss their attitudes about business in this startling 1978 documentary. After sounding off about unions, strikes, hierarchy and management, the subjects realized how callous they sounded and managed to convince the French government to suppress the film.

Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Details of the crime and of the trial that followed are told from varied perspectives, including the written confession of Pierre himself, and form a rich and complex narrative that interrogates the concepts of “truth” and “history”.

May, 1946, in Paris young poet Jacques Prevel meets Antonin Artaud, the actor, artist, and writer just released from a mental asylum. Over ten months, we follow the mad Artaud from his cruel coaching of an actress in his "theatre of cruelty" to his semi-friendship with Prevel who buys him drugs and hangs on his every word. Meanwhile, Prevel divides his time between Jany, his blond, young, drug-hazed mistress, and Rolande, his dark-haired, long-suffering wife, who has a child during this time. Cruelty, neglect, poverty, egoism, madness, and the pursuit of art mix on the Left Bank.

The main character is a woman trapped in the long stifling marriage in a boring province. She has an affair with a traveling photographer, follows him to Paris, and then has a series of unsatisfactory but interesting relationships, one of which is with a woman.

Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car, stolen by the hitchhiker, explodes, police believe the dead hitchhiker is Jean-Paul. Madeleine takes up with Jean-Paul's brother, Bastien, while Jean-Paul, arriving in Strasbourg, is mistaken for the heir to a fortune. The detective on the case spends more time writing crime novels than investigating real-life crimes.