Gilles Sandoz

Twelve Thousand

While he loses his clandestine work, and because he believes that Maroussia and him will no longer be able to love each other as well, Frank leaves to earn as much as she: twelve thousand, just what it takes to have a year before them. No more no less.

The Forest

The Forest is both a vibrantly spontaneous and brutally funny family drama, and a glorious tribute to acting and theater - in other words, an Arnaud Desplechin film. With Michel Vuillermoz and Denis Podalydès as the nephew and his friend, Adeline D’Hermy as the niece, and Martine Chevallier in a stunning performance as the sublimely selfish aunt Raissa.

Today

Satché is about to die. He decides to make his last day on this world the day of his life.

A Better Life

Yann, a cook, and Nadia, a waitress and mother of 9-year-old child, decide to risk everything on the purchase of a restaurant. With plenty of talent, energy, love and dreams, but no finance of their own, they find themselves forced into a jungle of financing and bank loans that quickly overwhelms them. To bail them out, Nadia has to take a job in Canada, while Yann is forced to stay behind to save the restaurant. Together, he and the child confront a relentless avalanche of creditors, an uncaring system and the daily grind from which there is no respite… Yann finally understands that his only chance of salvation lies in joining his lover – as well as reuniting mother and child – by following Nadia to Canada and a better life.

Back to Normandy

A filmmaker returns to Normandy thirty years after a working on a movie based on a local homicide and tries to find the actors who worked on the project.

Lady Chatterley

In the Chatterley country estate, monotonous days follow one after the other for Constance, trapped by her marriage and her sense of duty. During spring, deep in the heart of Wragby forest, she encounters Parkin, the estate’s gamekeeper. A tale of an encounter, a difficult apprenticeship, a slow awakening to sensuality for her, a long return to life for him. Or how love is but one with experience and transformation.

I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed

January 1966. In a Paris apartment, police discovers the corpse of Georges Figon, the man who broke the scandal of the Ben Barka affair and undermined Gaullist power.

Regular Lovers

1968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?

Ordo

Ordo Tupikos, a french sailor with greek origins, discover that his first wife, Estelle, with whom he had remained married a few months only 16 years earlier, is now a famous movie star called Louise Sandoli. But, more than her name, everything about Louise seems to have changed. Ordo decides to meet Estelle again, after all these years, to know what it's all about...

Eros Therapy

A husband wants to win back his wife, even though she has been living with her lesbian lover for six months.

Wild Side

A transgender woman returns – with her two male lovers – to her family home in the countryside to look after her dying mother.

France Boutique

Francois Cluzet and Karin Viard are the couple behind a French shopping channel whose business and marriage are both drifting towards the rocks, with Nathalie Baye as a smiling Rottweiller out to steal their business by conning them into offering a duff product, the 'Fear Eliminator,' and picking up the network for pennies in the ensuing financial fallout.

Va, petite!

Marie is twelve. When she must return to boarding school after summer vacation, she runs away. After five years at sea, François, 35, anchors ship with the aim of getting together with the woman of his dreams. But he feels uneasy with solid ground beneath his feet and takes to his heels. He and Marie cross paths. She’s a runaway kid looking for a world steadfast and true... and a dad to adopt.

Mimi

Mimi isn't a star, she's just someone. A close-up of the singularity of a real life. An encounter of someone's particular story, romance, fantasy and territories.

To Be and to Have

The documentary's title translates as "to be and to have", the two auxiliary verbs in the French language. It is about a primary school in the commune of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme, France, the population of which is just over 200. The school has one small class of mixed ages (from four to twelve years), with a dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez, who shows patience and respect for the children as we follow their story through a single school year.

La voleuse de Saint-Lubin

Françoise Barnier, the film's heroine, is a mother. One day, she stole something. She was in dire straits but no more so than usual. She was not in debt. She had always refused the degradation of excessive debt and charities, attempting to live in line with the rules laid down by society and the law. We follow her journey through the judicial institution. Here, two ideas of justice and law collide.

Gilded Youth

Spring to summer 2000. Gwenaëlle and Angéla are friends. They are seventeen and eighteen years old and live in the same town in the suburbs of Paris. Summer vacation is coming up. They put in a project at the Youth Department of the local town hall. It is selected and funded. They will be able to carry it out. Their project is a trip around France to photograph people's homes. They invite people to pose in front of their houses and take photographs of themselves. When school goes back, an exhibition is organized at the town hall. Full of curiosity and strengthened by their friendship, they encounter people from a range of backgrounds. They broaden their horizons and open up to the possibilities life has to offer. They have many adventures and sometimes their encounters lead them to stay in one place for several days

On appelle ça… le printemps

Fanfan leaves his friend Charles and thinks he can be accommodated by his friend, Joss. However, at the same time, Joss abandons the marital home. Fanfan and Joss have only to knock on the door of Manu, Fanfan's sister, who gathers them until Mytch, Manu's companion, throws everyone out. The three young women find themselves in the street and continue their run, while their lovers gang up to track them down. The mini-war of the sexes will flare up.

The Town Is Quiet

A dark tale of working-class life in Marseilles, a city in crisis. Interesting characters include a hard-bitten but compassionate fish market worker with a drug addicted daughter and a moody bartender with a shocking secret life.

The Sandmen

Alain runs Le Detour, a small cafe in Paris where Antoine works. Antoine is reunited with his sister Marie when she's released from prison; they are very close, perhaps abnormally so, but she's not aware that Antoine has fallen into cahoots with Stephane, who works as a waiter at another cafe. Damien, a local businessman, is pressuring Alain to expand Le Detour, and cut his nephew Xavier in for a percentage as a manager. While Alain waffles on Damien's proposal, Xavier offers Antoine a chance to make some money under the table by delivering some drugs to a cadre of dealers. Antoine makes the drop and picks up the payment, but runs off with the money rather than bringing it back to Xavier, which proves to have tragic consequences for Antoine and his friends.

Charge!

Two scriptwriter friends with opposing personalities fuss and fight as they cobble together a script for a modern political film. Their arguments seem endless, they constantly stray from the plot, but the story slowly takes shape around garage mechanics at Moliterno & co. who fight a multinational in order to save their business.

Nadia and the Hippos

Single mother Nadia is surviving on welfare while transport strikes are paralyzing France in December 1995. While watching the news, she recognizes the father of her child among the strikers and decides to go and search for him. But she has nowhere to go. The film, shot almost entirely at night, carries documentary qualities, part of which is due to the appearances of actual railroad workers in several group scenes.

Cold Lands

A young Frenchman of Arab descent, Djamel, becomes convinced that his long-lost father is a rich factory owner in Grenoble. When the man coldly rejects him, Djamel plots a revenge that will implicate the man's closeted gay son.

The Little Thief

In this French drama, a teenager falls into a life of crime, little realizing the consequences. S. is a moody young man who loses his job at a bakery, and decides to throw in his lot with a group of thieves about the same age as himself. S. and his cronies are strictly small-timers, pulling off second-rate break-ins for an older crime boss, but his willingness to do what he's told helps him rise up the ladder to bigger and more lucrative jobs. However, S. lacks the maturity or experience to deal with the risks, and after a few disastrous mistakes, he finds his fortunes sinking far faster than they rose.

Venus Beauty Institute

Aging beautician Angèle, already wounded by a long-ago romance, gets awkwardly dumped at a train station. Witnessing how she turns around a humiliating situation, younger sculptor Antoine becomes so smitten that he breaks up with his fiancée and sets out to win Angèle's heart. Meanwhile, Angèle attempts to quash the budding romance of her young co-worker, Marie, and a much older widowed client, despite their obvious rapport.

Where the Heart Is

From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.

Marius and Jeannette

Jeannette is a single mother living in a working-class community in Marseilles; she tries to support herself and her two kids on her salary as a check-out girl at a supermarket and lives in an apartment complex where everyone is thrown into close proximity with everyone else. Marius is working as a security guard at a cement factory that has gone out of business; he's also squatting in the building, since the plant is soon to be demolished and he'll be needing his money later on. One day, Jeannette happens by the factory, and spotting several cans of paint, tries to take two of them home with her. Marius spots her and tries to chase her away, while she rails at him with curses against the capitalist system. The next day, an apologetic Marius appears at her doorstep, cans of paint in hand; the two soon become friendly, and a romance begins to bloom, though it quickly becomes obvious that Jeannette's romance novel fantasies are a bit off the mark from what Marius has in mind.

L'Âge des possibles

Ten young people ( boys and girls) at the age at which all is possible. They meet, they love, they choose. The film comes and goes between all those people, revealing their anguish, their dreams, depicting the portrait of a generation of the '90s which has both the fury and the fear of life.