Heart of an Oak

Alain is getting older. For years he has been filming his daily life: his partner Françoise, the people he meets, nature and animals, and life in all its splendour and cruelty. Having devoted his entire life to filmmaking, with the camera as an extension of his arm, he has observed the world with a poetic sense of authenticity and simplicity. Otherness, the approach of death, the power of life and the importance of others intertwine as he looks back on his life as a filmmaker and as a man, concealing nothing, and offering a vision of the universality of the human experience.

A film-crew follow the investigation of a cop killing.

Léon : This morning, Léon the shoe-repairer puts up a sign in his store that he's managed for forty-six years : "Closing down in two months." Panic sets in among the neighborhood inhabitants, who adore this big-hearted Armenian with an amazing face. Is there some way to make stay longer ? Guillaume : Four o'clock in the morning, Guillaume arrives at work first, ahead of his team. At the end of the day, he will have sold all his cakes and bread, that's how good they are. In the evening, he and his wife Jasmine dream of buying a bigger and better located pastry store.

In 1974, Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky embarked on the quixotic project of adapting Frank Herbert's influential novel Dune (1969) for the big screen. After investing two years, and millions of dollars, the gigantic project ended in failure; but the artists Jodorowsky brought together to carry it out continued to work together, and ended up laying the foundations for modern science fiction cinema.

Two actors play eighteen different roles in a story that asks the question: would my life have been different if I had lit a cigarette?

Famed swordsman and poet Cyrano de Bergerac is in love with his cousin Roxane. He has never expressed his love for her as he his large nose undermines his self-confidence. Then he finds a way to express his love to her, indirectly.

'Having broken away from my illusory self, I was desperately seeking a path and a meaning to life.' This phrase perfectly sums up Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical project: reconstituting the incredible adventure of his life. He was born in 1929 Tocopilla, a coastal town on edge of the Chilean desert, where he discovered the fundamentals of reality, as he underwent an unhappy and alienated childhood as part of an uprooted family.

Douglas is a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Jane is his assistant. On her travels, she meets two men who would change her life forever: a handsome young cadet Andrej Tolstoy with whom she shares a fondness for opera, and the powerful General Radlov who is entranced by her beauty and wants to marry her.

Business executive Odile seeks a new, larger apartment. Her younger sister Camille, having completed her doctoral thesis in history, is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours as he's attracted to her. However, Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.

It was from Dahomey (now Benin, Africa) that the cult of the deads was exported - through the slave trade - to Brazil, and Haiti. The film narrates the modern story of this ethnographical, religious culture. A team of initiates could film troubling images documenting initiation ceremonies and the sacred lethargy that can take as much as seven, or even eleven days, and in which the body started decomposing itself. Then, the resuscitation happens.

Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...

Screen adapatation of Mozart's greatest opera. Don Giovanni, the infamous womanizer, makes one conquest after another until the ghost of Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, (whom Giovanni killed) makes his appearance. He offers Giovanni one last chance to repent for his multitudinious improprieties. He will not change his ways So, he is sucked down into hell by evil spirits. High drama, hysterical comedy, magnificent music!

“I have on occasion experienced filmmaking as an intensely shared activity. Lively friendships result and remain. Filming that affection today is no act of nostalgia. Paths once crossed make things simple. People who have been behind the camera, or in front of it, giving the movie their all, are without illusion.” (Alain Cavalier)

René, a children's theater performer, has a problem : he is a hearty eater and he weighs no less than 155 kilos. After being abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides to go on a diet, notably to reconquer her. It is also an opportunity for him to question his former lifestyle and to define new values...

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.