The tragic story of French naïve painter Séraphine Louis aka Séraphine de Senlis (1864-1942), a humble servant who becomes a gifted self-taught painter. Discovered by prominent critic and collector William Uhde, she came to prominence between the wars grouped with other naïve painters like Henri Rouseau only to descend into madness and obscurity with the onset of Great Depression and World War II.
In a beauty salon in Beirut the lives of five women cross paths. The beauty salon is a colorful and sensual microcosm where they share and entrust their hopes, fears and expectations.
Katya and her 6-year-old son Sanya, who, in 1952, meet a veteran Soviet officer named Tolyan. Katya falls in love with Tolyan, who turns out to be a small time criminal, but who also becomes a father figure to Sanya ...
A three-part anthology film about love and sexuality: a menage-a-trois between a couple and a young woman on the coast of Tuscany; an advertising executive under enormous pressure at work, who, during visits to his psychiatrist, is pulled to delve into the possible reasons why his stress seems to manifest itself in a recurring erotic dream; and a story of unrequited love about a beautiful, 1960s high-end call girl in an impossible affair with her young tailor.
Inspired to a true story, on November 5th 1991, Rita Atria a young 17-year-old Sicilian girl, goes to see an anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino to denounce the Mafia system that was responsible for the murder of her father and her brother. It is the first time that such a young woman from a Mafia family rebels and betrays the Mafia. From that moment on, Rita's days are numbered. She only has nine months to live...
If he buys a gun, visits his wife's lover, and ends up savagely biting his dentist, Samuel Polaris is in bad shape. Very bad. Unless the others, the “normal” people – with their career plans, their adulteries, their arrogant incompetence – have fallen into a sort of collective madness. Who knows. Because he has no choice, because he is in love with his wife and because he refuses to resign himself to the worst, Samuel Polaris decides to regain his dignity. Even if, to do this, he has to steal from his psychiatrist the watch that Kennedy was wearing the day he was assassinated.
Bologna, 1976. The paths of two aimless young friends intertwine with those of Radio Alice, a pirate radio politically aligned with the leftist student movement.
Six characters cross paths in Paris and Lisbon.
A long time ago, a young Russian general chose to sacrifice hundreds of birds to burn Moscow and save his motherland from the troops of Napoleon. For this feat, he was hailed as a hero by the people of Russia but regarded an executioner by the winged creatures. Now fifty years older the aging general leads a drab life. To make matters worse, the descendants of the sacrificed birds keep attacking him. One day however a meets an engaging little dog who soon becomes his faithful companion. Both friends decide to break the curse plaguing the general's life : they start militating for all the caged birds of Russia to be set free.
The end of the XVIII century. The reign of Catherine II. In the deep Russian provinces, among the vast steppes of the Ural escaped convict Yemelyan Pugachev proclaimed himself Emperor Peter III of Russia. Under the banner of the Pretender embarked detachments of Cossacks, fugitive serfs, and many spirited people. In these troubled times in the God-forsaken Belogorsk young officer Pyotr Grinyov meets his first love - Masha, the daughter of Captain Mironov. Recklessly passionate love with each other did not want to notice the signs of impending trouble. They did not know that soon they will be an ordeal. They could not imagine how bizarre way their fates intertwined with the fate of the self-proclaimed king, and what an incredible effort will be worth it to save their lives and feelings in the bloody chaos of Russian riot.
Andre starts as a teacher in a remote mountain village in Albania. His first task is to choose one of two communist slogans. He picks the shorter one, which is appreciated by his class, because they have to build the slogan on the hillside using whitewashed rocks. However, this means that the longer slogan goes to Diana, the French teacher to whom Andre is attracted. Andre gets on the wrong side of the communist party boss of the village, when he stands up for an unjustly accused goat herdsman, whom he had befriended. The boss is determined to take his revenge on Andre.
Three story-lines run in parallel in a town in Ile de France. Louis, a divorced café proprietor, flirts with every woman he bumps into, but doesn't develop any deeper relationship with them, except a growing affection for Sabine, the prostitute he sees regularly at a local hotel. His sister Agnès is a teacher, and is apparently happily married to Jean-Philippe, but he works very hard and doesn't seem to have been giving her all the affection she needs recently. She bumps into Stéphane, a young man recently returned to the town whom she knew as a child. He is obsessively interested in a young family who live nearby. The film gradually explores the hidden feelings and desires of each of the main characters. Will any of them find happiness?
A film ‘twin’ to the novel My Life as a Russian Novel, this documentary charts Carrère’s journey to Kotelnitch, a town some 800 km east of Moscow, as he investigates what happened to a Hungarian POW, and then the young Ania. Through exploring the lives of others the writer finds the courage to tell his own story.
