Cahier d'un retour en langue natale

30 years after his debut, Olivier Assayas is back in New York to present his latest feature film shot in Paris, London, Prague and Oman - This portrait of the filmmaker is part of the collection « Cinéma, de notre temps » created by Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe.

Baran, a war hero, becomes sheriff of the capital and refuses to bow down to a tribal chief.

Grégoire Canvel has everything a man could want. A wife he loves, three delightful children, and a stimulating job. He's a film producer. Discovering talented filmmakers and developing films that fit his conception of the cinema-free and true to life-is precisely his reason for living. Yet his prestigious production company, Moon Films, is on its last legs.

A father and daughter are reunited some 11 years after the father's drug addiction tore the family apart.

Claude falls in love with Cécile. She is convinced that she is the woman of her life unlike her mother who knows the tumultuous sentimental life of her daughter.

Lucie and her father Hugo have grown closer since Lucie's mother left unexpectedly a year prior. When her mother returns, Hugo becomes jealous and angry.

Jacques summons to lunch his two children, adults already. He is about to break up with their mother and the time has come for him to return, in a most honest possible way, on the stories of his past and present love life.

On a wintery January afternoon, a girl walks in a park by herself. As groups of boys play football, she strolls about, observing the activities of her fellow park-goers.

A Moroccan wedding ceremony - the bride, deeply veiled, is entrusted to the groom. While the musicians play and the women emit traditional trilling sounds, the couple retreats to the unknown realms of their shared bedroom. There, a bizarre drama unfolds while the wedding party waits for the bloody linen cloth.

Saturday focuses on the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, an evangelical Christian denomination with an apocalyptic expectation, that celebrates the Sabbath and practices immersion baptism rituals on Saturday. Through the figure of the SDA Church appear the themes of hope for a better life and the desire to flee the daily mundane, which here manifests in a religious mode, but takes form elsewhere in the practice of particular dietary rules and extreme sports. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines scenes recorded at SDA Church sites in the USA, Polynesia, and the Kingdom of Tonga with images of food, surfing, and medical tests; together, they immerse us in a parallel world of hope and belief – of transparencies and opacities. Meanwhile, text scrolling at the bottom of the screen materializes both a source of information and a desire to escape from it.

Beirut, on an autumn day. The city is on the edge of chaos, but for Maya, Tarek, Yasmina and Rami, aged between 17 and 22 years old, it is just an ordinary day during which they question themselves about sex, love and night time hanging out.