The French Boys

A filmmaker talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films.

Struggling to overcome cycles of betrayal, revenge and violence, the Traoré brothers continue to fight for a brighter future in a seedy Paris suburb.

Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?

Grieving and facing the consequences of their crimes, the Traoré brothers get one last chance to forge a new path.

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Jean is young, gay, and promiscuous. Only after he meets one or two women, including Laura, does he come to realize his bisexuality. Jean has to overcome a personal crisis and a tough choice between Laura and his male lover Samy.

After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

Island of Tahiti. French government official De Roller is a calculating man with impeccable manners, capable of dealing with both high society and the locals he frequents in shady joints.

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.

Noumouké, from the suburb of Paris, is about to decide which brother's foot steps to follow - the lawyer student Soulaymaan or the gangster Demba.

Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.

After writing for Cahiers du cinéma, young Godard decides making films is the best film criticism. He gets Beauregard to fund a low-budget feature, creating a treatment with Truffaut about a gangster couple.

A young Jewish girl, Sara, is looking to escape the clutches of the Third Reich after seeing her parents and sister brutally slain by a smuggler who betrayed them while attempting to escape to England. Terrified, she is sheltered by her childhood friend Jean, a homosexual in a clandestine relationship with his lover Philippe.

Roméo and Juliette are two young actors. They fall in love at first sight, move in together and make a baby. A love story and the founding of a home like millions of others. Except that their little boy, Adam, behaves abnormally. The young parents try hard to persuade themselves that everything is okay but, with the passing of time, they cannot delude themselves anymore: their son has a problem. From now on, war is declared. A war against illness. A war against Death. A war against despair.

A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.

A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.

In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.

Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after a year of high school, goes to live with his mother in the south of France; a harsher environment which rapidly changes his perception of friends, work, and women.

Louis XIV, the French sun-king has two passions, establishing absolute rule over the realm -after decades of religious/civil wars- by divine right and artistic brilliancy as a dancer

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.