Serge Toubiana spent a year in the company of Isabelle Huppert. Wherever she went he followed, including prepping for a theatre production of Medea, doing promo work at Cannes, posing for photo shoots, as well behind the scenes footage of Huppert working with Claude Chabrol on Merci Pour le Chocolat’ and Michael Haneke on The Piano Teacher.
Tag: FRANCE
After winning the “most virgin” contest, Miss Canada is married to a rich milk tycoon. But she quickly flees the marriage to experience the world around her, full of sweetness and anarchy. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.
Taafé fanga is the film version of a Mali folk tale. The well-known griot Sidiki Diabaté is our guide through the cliff rocks of Bandiagara and through the past of the Dogon people. When the Albarga, the mask of the local spirits and also symbol of power, falls into the hands of the young woman Yayémé, this causes chaos in Yanda. The women exchange their skirts for the trousers of the men. Is it a curse? A divine punishment? The women take over power, but will the new order be able to resist all its inherent contradictions?
In Lausanne, Léon is involved by accident with a small Leninist group and gets to know Léa, a dedicated activist and the group leader’s mistress. The police keep a close watch on them and trouble is bound to follow.
When bush fires break out in a small village in Malo, Sidy, a young forestry commissioner from the city, must journey into the spiritual realm. Although Sidy has been trained in modern techniques, he accepts that only by finding an herbal cure, called the seventh canari, prophesied by the oracle, can the fires be stopped. His journey into the Dogon country, popularized by western anthropologists, is his final step towards linking the two worlds, traditional and modern.
Japan, 1986. At the tail end of the world tour promoting their latest album Revenge, Eurythmics tops the charts. Between concerts, pop duo Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart survey Japan’s cultural soundscape with the help of Conny Plank: A world of sounds both brutally technological and highly refined by tradition.
Brulard, a French civil engineer on assignment in a remote Swedish village, meets Ina, who has been raised in forested isolation by her haggish mother and believes herself to be a witch. He falls in love with her and tries to convert her to civilization; but in the meantime, his female boss, Kristina, has fallen in love with him, while the villagers turn against him for consorting with someone they believe is cursed by the Devil.
At Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, a territory of romantic landscapes, Eric Dahan visits Paul Morrissey in his retreat. The numerous views of the ocean seem to metaphorize the form of the documentary, which is constructed as a layering of the continuous flow of the filmmaker’s words, images from his films—’Trash’ (1970), ‘Forty Deuce’ (1982), or ‘Mixed Blood’ (1985)—and a tour of his home.