IP5: The Island of Pachyderms

Reality TV has invaded the world television space for several years. Garbage television, attack to the human dignity, cultural desertification for some, phenomenon of society, new frontiers of the intimacy, formidable gas pedal of television particles for the others; the debate on reality TV arouses a deep and lasting emotion, in short, it produces word. It is this word that we decided to relay by the glance and the images, we propose to decipher some of the paradoxes which riddle the multiple reflections of the many personalities that we interviewed.

In 1977, after working as an assistant director on several features, BETTY BLUE filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix directed the following short film about a man and his dog.

A lackadaisical handyman and aspiring novelist tries to support his younger girlfriend as she slowly succumbs to madness.

Charles Duchemin, a well-known gourmet and publisher of a famous restaurant guide, is waging a war against fast food entrepreneur Tri- catel to save the French art of cooking. After having agreed to appear on a talk show to show his skills in naming food and wine by taste, he is confronted with two disasters: his son wants to become a clown rather than a restaurant tester and he, the famous Charles Duchemin, has lost his taste!

A father plans to kill in the same day the nine members of the jury who condemned his son to death.

Jules, a young Parisian postman, secretly records a concert performance given by the opera singer Cynthia Hawkins, whom he idolises. The following day, Jules runs into a woman who is being pursued by armed thugs. Before she is killed, the woman slips an audio cassette into his mail bag...

On December 8, 1995, at the age of 43, Jean-Dominque Bauby, editor-in-chief of ELLE Magazine, suffered from a stroke and fell into a coma. When Bauby awoke he found himself completely speechless and paralyzed. In Locked-In Syndrome, director Jean-Jacques Beiniex follows Bauby's efforts to write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was later adapted into a critically acclaimed film.

Young pilot Tony Cardot goes on the run after inadvertently crashing his plane into a group of Gypsy children. He reaches Montreal and crosses paths with American gangster Charley Ellis, who forces him to join in his gang's latest scheme.

The whole intrigue is centered around carte-blanche documents kept in a vault. Whoever fills in the blank becomes the owner of a revue. Big money is involved. The nephew of the owner of the vault is trying to cheat his uncle and have his name in the documents. Everything is even more complicated because the manager of the bank has a finger in the pie, too. Who but a humble bank-teller (Pierre Richard) will ruin the scheme?

When a woman is accused of murder, the investigation slowly reveals numerous political connections. Laubret, the court-appointed defense lawyer, does everything in his power to expose the truth.

A dockworker seeking revenge on the killer of his sister finds himself the object of desire for two women.

Thierry drops out of school to apprentice as a lion tamer at the zoo where he meets Roselyne, who shares his passion. They fall in love and when he loses his job, the young lovers journey across France finding odd jobs at several circuses. In Germany, they fall under the tutelage of ageing big cat trainer, Klint, and while they are closer to realising their dreams, they find that their success drivers them part.

Michel, a psycho-analyst, falls asleep while listening to his patient Olga, a kleptomaniac and a sexual pervert, tell him how she likes her husband beating her. When he wakes up, he finds Olga having been choked to death. He now has to deal with a body, with Olga's rich husband who thinks she stole money from him, and with all his patients' insanity that haunts him.

In a little French town everything goes on as usual and people seem friendly and good-natured, until the day two women arrive from Paris. A man gets off the same bus, and that very night he seizes the two women and asks for the most beautiful woman in town as their ransom. After the initial shock, the mayor, his brother, the prefect, the police, and the gendarmerie gather around the house where the two woman are imprisoned. It will be a test for everyone and each of them will show his/her real stuff: hypocrisy, meanness, or humanity concealed under their provincial respectability.

French Postcards rings both comic and true. The believable, fresh-faced characters are young naives from American colleges spending their French-English dictionaries, they compulsively seek out hundreds of monuments, romanticize the nomadic artist's life, and look for grown-up love. The French tutor them well, as befits their reputation. Jean Rochefort is the harassed headmaster with a hankering for affairs, and Marie-France Pisier is his very sexy wife. Watch for a newcomer named Debra Winger, and another-Mandy Patinkin.

A documentary that explores the life styles of various otakus in Japan. Various interviews are given to selected otakus who express how interesting it is to be an otaku as oppose to not being one at all. Along with various shots of various Japanese city landscapes and the inside of an average otaku home from rooms filled with videos, models, and the latest in technology.