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Michel is a young technician in the fledgling TV industry and is due for military service in two months at the time of the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are inseparable best friends, and aspiring actresses, who hang around outside the TV studio. Michel invites them in to watch, flirts with them both, and dates them separately and together. When Michel goes on a holiday to Corsica, just before he is drafted, the girls follow.
In France during World War II, a poor and illiterate man, Henri Fortin, is introduced to Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérables and begins to see parallels between the book and his own life.
A renowned doctor and his brother live and work together until the brother falls in love with Marie, a singer, and gives up medicine to be with her. After a time however, she misses her old life and goes back on the stage – an act which leads her lover to commit suicide. Later the doctor and Marie also meet, and she becomes his mistress. He finds out about his brother’s suicide and goes through his artifacts looking for a clue as to what might have been the cause. He finds a photograph of Marie and realizes the truth, which decimates their relationship.
Shot in the summer of 1980, this film from longtime directorial partners Straub and Huillet investigates the changing relationship between people, the land, and society in France and Egypt.
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Angèle, the daughter of Clarius, a farmer in the mountain of Provence, lives with her parents and their valet Saturnin. One day, near the farm, she meets Louis, a good-looking young man from Marseilles who is taking a holiday there. Unaware that he is nothing but a gigolo she is seduced by Louis and follows him to the city. But Louis, who has made her pregnant, forces her to be a whore before rejecting her. A year later, Saturnin comes to Marseilles in search of Angèle and finds her in a sorry state. He persuades her to return to the farm….
The workforce of a factory owned by the patriarchal boss Doberdo are on strike. During a police raid to break the strike, one of the workers is killed. The dead man’s wife, La Califfa, confronts Doberdo several times. On each occasion, the factory owner and the widow feel strangely drawn to one another…
Somewhere between Woody Allen and Freud, between documentary and fiction, Histoires d’Amerique conjures up the destinies of several generations of Jewish immigrants in New York.
For generations, the Torrignes family have lived in a splendid old house in the south of France. By the early 1930s, the family’s fortune has dried up and there is no other recourse than to sell the house. The present occupants are the widower and amateur photographer Walter Lherminier, his 16-year old daughter Juliette, and his elderly spinster sister Délie. For the last time, they invite the other members of the family to the house so that they can spend one last summer together.
