Daniel Toscan du Plantier

We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

A second-class horror movie has to be shown at Cannes Film Festival, but, before each screening, the projectionist is killed by a mysterious fellow, with hammer and sickle, just as it happens in the film to be shown.

A look at Fellini's creative process. In extensive interviews, Fellini talks a bit about his background and then discusses how he works and how he creates. Several actors, a producer, a writer, and a production manager talk about working with Fellini. Archive footage of Fellini and others on the set plus clips from his films provide commentary and illustration for the points interviewees make. Fellini is fully in charge; actors call themselves puppets. He dismisses improvisation and calls for "availability." His sets and his films create images that look like reality but are not; we see the differences and the results.

Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made.

In WWII France, poor and illiterate Henri Fortin is introduced to Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables and begins to see parallels between the book and his own life.

Successful writer/director Bernard Rougerie is at a creative dead end and decides to isolate himself from his wife in order to complete the script for his next film. Bernard moves into an apartment building whose tenants are in the midst of a revolt against their abusive landlord. Reluctant at first, he joins their cause and then becomes involved in an affair with young, unemployed resident Anne.

Documentary showing one day of work of over 90 actors and filmmakers from French cinema on the same day. On 27 March 2002, 27 teams filmed actors, directors, producers and technicians at work, from Hawaii to Paris and from New York to Lisbon.

Olivia, Irina and Masha are improving their acting skills. They no longer believe in Prince Charming, and their career is waning. Olivia works at the front desk at the airport and offers a wonderful plan: he would do so that friends will be aboard the Paris - New York plane and will sit next to wealthy men. Their task is to seduce the rich and pull them out of money. But the fraudsters do not suspect that Comissaire Bayard and his young assistant are closely watching them...

It is unnecessary to introduce Toscan de Plantier, the famous French film producer. Right from the instant of his death, the idea arose to retain, focus on, and seize the spark that had just disappeared. This would be done by reconstructing, through several hundred interviews over nearly thirty years, the puzzle of this thinker who, under his flamboyant strolling player exterior that celebrated art and life like a party, was extraordinarily true to himself, and from a truly cultural background with which he irrigated the field of action of cinema. His energy, enthusiasm and implacable conviction should excite, move, enlighten, surprise, and provide food for thought, well beyond the professional context that was his, to an era that sorely needs it.

Noël Godin and his supporters throw a pie with cream into the face of Daniel Toscan du Plantier in the Palace of the Film Festival of Cannes 1996.