Jacques Penot

Letter to my brother Guy Gilles, filmmaker who passed away too soon

Posthumous tribute paid by actor Luc Bernard to his older brother, director Guy Gilles ( 1938 - 1996 ). Documentary composed of interviews with some of his brother's friends and some actors from his main films, excerpts of which we see.

Marie's Counter

A bistro counter will decide the fate of two women. The first, Marie, the owner of a cafe for forty years in a Breton village, wants to realize her dream and go to the city. The second, Joelle, wants to leave town for the countryside.

La balle au bond

A mother, depressed since the birth of her twin daughters, sinks into alcoholism, but her eldest son decides to do everything to save his family.

Pas d'amour sans amour!

After her gynecologist tells her that her current involuntary celibacy could result in her being unable to enjoy sex in the future, Eva begins to consider ways that she could take active steps to get some action going in that area. Unfortunately, none of the men she currently knows are interested in going to bed with her, including her business partner, who just might be sexually attracted to trees but certainly isn't to her. That being the case, it is particularly galling that he gets jealous at the very notion of her having sex with business clients. Eva discusses these issues (and a great deal more) with her similarly forty-ish gal-pals.

Ma soeur, mon amour

In 1929, Mr. Messier, owner of a small print shop in a village in Quebec became a widower, he lives with his two children, Rachel, 9 years old, and Gaëtan, 7 years old. In this closed universe and in the absence of their mother, a great complicity is established between the children.

Bezness

Roufa is an attractive young man, and that works out well for him because he is a practitioner of "bezness:" he's a sex-for-hire boy for the tourists who come to Tunisia. His girlfriend deeply resents his having sex with other women but doesn't seem much bothered that a rich German man he's been having sex with is hoping to sponsor him in Europe. She also has a hard time with his tendency to behave like any other Arab male around a woman, telling her how to take care of her business. As it turns out, she's got better sense than any of the men around her.

The Long Winter

In 1939, Ramón was a young man, caught up in his Barcelona family's involvement on the Republic side in the brutal Spanish Civil War. He and his family fled into exile ahead of Franco's troops. Now it is many years later, and he has come back to see how his old homestead fared in the intervening years. The only person he can find who is able to remember those years clearly is his family's old butler Claudio.

Milena

Prague, 1920. Milena's father wants her to follow in his footsteps and be one of the first female doctors in Czechoslovakia, but she is determined to be a writer. She elopes to Vienna with the Jewish music critic Ernst Pollak, and starts a correspondence with Franz Kafka. She leaves Pollak and returns to Prague with her father, where she befriends and translates Kafka. As a journalist, Milena covers the 1923 Ruhr worker's strike and meets the communist architect Jaromir.

Après la pluie

In this melodrama, a woman whose husband has begun seeing a wholly unsuitable woman runs away and attempts to support her son and herself by doing construction work. Many years later, after the death of his mother, the boy makes his father's acquaintance once again.

Jour après jour

Two would be producers launch a singer's career.

The Revolving Doors

A quiet painter, separated from his wife for a year, receives a suitcase in the mail from his mother, whom he hasn't seen since infancy. He believes she abandoned him to his wealthy, paternal grandparents. The suitcase contains mementos and a diary, a long letter to him, written over the years, with details of her youth, her first job as a pianist at a cinema, the coming of talkies, her marriage, and how he came to live with his grandparents. As he reads through the materials and her story comes to life, his son Antoine, who's about 10 or 12, tries to break through his father's silence and sorrow by taking matters into his own hands.

Les Nouveaux Tricheurs

Adolescents or young adults, Franck, Christine and the others meet, bond, leave each other. But the drama lurks.

The Cry of the Owl

Robert is an architect and artist, in Vichy after separating from his Parisian wife. Robert finds it calms him to stand in the shadows of the home of Juliette and Patrick and watch her cook. She thinks he's a prowler and confronts him, then invites him in...

Sale destin

Francois Marboni is a butcher who is being blackmailed for having an affair with the prostitute Rachel in this black comedy. He decides to hire a hit man when the blackmailer demands that he start cutting his profit margin to the bone. Francois soon becomes a target of the hitman he hired.

Charly

Charly, a young man in his thirties, is illiterate. He hides this handicap by combining humor and a sense of trickery. Charly found his mode of expression: music, for which and by which he lives while searching in the metro with his friends. It is there that he will meet Marie, seduced by this marginal sax player. Marie, despite the tricks deployed by Charly, will quickly realize that he is illiterate. But love has already given Charly the desire to learn to read...

Strictement personnel

The crimes and tragedies that tear apart one family seem overblown in the telling, yet this psychological drama about the miseries of one French policeman is compelling throughout. Jean (Pierre Arditi) is a cop and also a failed novelist who was abandoned by his father, brother, and sister after his mother died. The trio move to Paris where they set up an art scam that nets them considerable cash -- something Jean begins to figure out when he joins them for a family reunion. Little by little, he learns that his father is an expert forger, his stepmother's art gallery seems to be involved in the scam, his brother is a derelict and into drugs, his stepmother is a hooker in addition to all of this, and his sister runs an exercise gym for keeping prostitutes in shape. Things get worse -- just when everything seems bad enough, the stepmother is murdered and it is up to Jean to find the killer.

Diesel

A prostitute, released from prison, tries to change her life, but a murderous slave organization, the Consortium, is determined to bring her back to the fold or kill her, which forces her to seek help from Liberty, an anti-Consortium group.

Derborence

Antoine leaves his new bride behind to go on a skiing excursion with his uncle up the mountain behind their village of Derborence. Nine weeks after an avalanche apparently buries them alive, Antoine returns home. Certain that his uncle has also survived, he resolves to go back up and look for him—leaving his now-pregnant wife behind once more.

Farewell Fred

Fred is a gambler and deep in debt. He owes crime boss Victor a lot of money and the time to pay has come. He decides to take a massive risk to refund his debts and agrees to kill a man. Fred knows he has to pay his debt and that the only way to do it is to carry out the hit arranged by Victor.

Le Matelot 512

Max, who dreams of adventures, abandons his studies at 18 to become involved in the navy. He becomes the sailor 512.

For Those I Loved

Polish Martin Gray recalls the Holocaust, New York prosperity, and losing his wife and family.

Le Crime d'amour

To emerge from anonymity, a young man assumes responsibility for a crime he did not commit.

L'Apprentissage de la ville

Reduced to poverty, a young man is taken in by a rich lady who asks him for some dangerous services in exchange.