From Where They Stood

Overview

In a Parisian public hospital, Claire Simon questions what it means to live in women’s bodies, filming their diversity, singularity and their beauty in all stages throughout life. Unique stories of desires, fears and struggles unfold, including the one of the filmmaker herself.

Why this

9 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal decade: 2020s language: fr popularityBand: obscure rating: 7 year: 2023

Details

169 min NO FR FR 18 votes

Overview

Gilles Caron was at the height of his career as a brilliant photojournalist when he went missing in Cambodia in 1970. He was just 30 years old. Through his iconic photographs, and the gaps between them, this film, constructed like an investigation, aims to restore the photographer’s presence, recount the story of his gaze, and how he managed to cover every high profile conflict of his day in such a short period of time.

Why this

9 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure rating: 7 runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

93 min NO FR FR Documentary 11 votes

Overview

In 1945, when the Allies liberated the concentration camps, they discovered thousands of secretly created artworks. With unprecedented access to paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures held in collections around the world, BECAUSE I WAS A PAINTER conducts a gripping and fascinating investigation into art that captures, reflects and inspires in difficult times.

Why this

6 shared reasons

certification: NO director: Christophe Cognet genre: Documentary popularityBand: obscure rating: 7 runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

104 min NO DE EN Documentary 1 votes

Overview

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many people in Russia faced a brutal choice: prison, the army – or exile. Margarita, Yuri and their friends are caught in the crosscurrents of history, with no way to return home, but also no place where they feel truly welcome.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure

Details

87 min NO FR FR Documentary 1 votes

Overview

The Adamant is a unique day-care centre. A floating structure located on the Seine in the heart of Paris, it welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders, offering the kind of care that grounds them in time and space and helps them to recover or keep up their spirits. The team running it tries to resist the deterioration and dehumanisation of psychiatry as best as they can.

Why this

9 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal decade: 2020s language: fr popularityBand: obscure rating: 7 runtimeRange: movie:91-120 year: 2023

Details

109 min NO FR FR 43 votes

Overview

Annie becomes pregnant. Since she doesn't want to keep the child, she meets a movement that performs illegal abortions. But, in the seventies, Annie will encounter allies and opponents along the way.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s language: fr rating: 7 runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

119 min NO FR FR 144 votes

Overview

The Aviron Bayonnais is a rugby team having a streak of bad luck. Even though they fight relentlessly, they keep losing. One day, though, things change. Everything seems to be possible again. But will the team be able to keep up the momentum? Delphine Gleize films this sports odyssey with humour and passion. She is the only woman in the locker room and the men talk to her as if she were one of them. Through her camera, getting close while keeping an observational distance, the filmmaker manages to capture elements that define and clarify male bonds and relationships.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR editor: Catherine Zins genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

99 min NO FR FR Documentary 4 votes

Overview

Isabelle Huppert's first one-character project — out of the blue, an electrifying, form-smashing tour de force, capturing (for those with ears to hear) our current moment.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s popularityBand: obscure rating: 7 year: 2023

Details

87 min NO FR EN 3 votes

Overview

An urban train link, the RER B, crosses Paris and its outskirts from north to south. A journey within indistinct spaces known as inner cities and suburbs. Several portraits, all individual pieces that form a whole. We.

Why this

8 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

115 min NO FR FR Documentary 18 votes

Overview

In 1982, Yann Andréa and Marguerite Duras have been living together for two years. She is almost 70 years old, while he is 38 years her junior. Andréa asks journalist and writer Michèle Manceaux to interview him about his life with Duras, an obsession that both impassions him and drives him mad. He believes by entrusting their story to Manceaux, he may gain more clarity of the relationship. What follows is an intense and compelling conversation delving into the deepest recesses of modern love.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

95 min NO FR FR 14 votes

Why this

6 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR editor: Catherine Zins genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure

Details

NO FR FR Documentary 1 votes

Overview

Jean-Christophe Klotz was a cameraman for a French broadcast news service in 1996 when he was sent to Rwanda to cover the growing violence between ruling Hutus and rival Tutsi tribespeople. What Klotz saw profoundly shocked him, as bodies littered the sides of the roads and bloody massacres became the order of the day. In between interviews with government officials and United Nations forces vainly struggling to contain the violence, Klotz captured the mayhem on film, believing that if world leaders saw what was happening, they would step forward to stop the violence. When Klotz was injured while filming an attack, he was sent back to Paris, and while his footage was aired, French forces only belatedly arrived, ultimately doing more to protect those who caused the massacre than bringing them to justice. Years later, Klotz used his footage to help identify some of the victims of the killings, and in 2006 he returned to Rwanda to visit the nation after the violence had ceased.

Why this

6 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR editor: Catherine Zins genre: Documentary language: fr runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

94 min NO FR FR Documentary

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

108 min NO FR FR Documentary 3 votes

Overview

1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Algerian independence activists are released from Rennes prison. For one night, filmmaker Yann Le Masson films them. They tell him their vision for the future of Algeria and the place women must occupy in the new society to be built. Fifty years later, with the soundtrack missing, Raphaël Pillosio sets out to find these women. Two deaf people set about lip-reading the women filmed by Yann Le Masson, revealing snatches of sentences, words cut short by the camera's shifts. An investigative film in which the few activists still alive discover their old testimonies and tell us their silent story. The reconstruction of the lost soundtrack will remain in suspense; no happy ending will come to absorb the absence, to cancel the ferocious operation of time. An essay film about cinema that depicts their disappearance, and forever keeps them alive.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Raphaël Pillosio decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure

Details

84 min NO FR FR Documentary History 3 votes

Overview

Sidonie Perceval, an established French writer, is mourning her deceased husband. Invited to Japan for the reedition of her first book, she is welcomed by her local editor who takes her to Kyoto, the city of shrines and temples. As they travel together through the Japanese spring blossoms, she slowly opens up to him. But the ghost of her husband follows Sidonie: she will have to finally let go of the past to let herself love again.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

95 min NO FR FR 49 votes

Overview

Overwhelmed when a figure from her past reemerges, Joan Verra retreats to the countryside with her son Nathan. There she experiences fragmented recollections of her past romantic encounters.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO cinematographer: Céline Bozon country: FR decade: 2020s language: fr popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

101 min NO FR FR 28 votes

Overview

A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Raphaël Pillosio decade: 2020s genre: Documentary popularityBand: obscure runtimeRange: movie:91-120

Details

112 min NO FR FA Documentary 2 votes

Why this

6 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR editor: Catherine Zins genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure

Details

NO FR FR Documentary 1 votes

Overview

On a stretch of desert coastline in northern Chile where it never rains, seaweed collectors live on a shoestring and live life to the fullest, in shacks surrounded by garbage cans and driving rickety cars. A happy vision of the simplicity of the world.

Why this

7 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Nathalie Vidal decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr popularityBand: obscure

Details

74 min NO FR FR Documentary 1 votes

Overview

Two brothers reunite in their childhood home to speak about the incest one of them suffered there as a child. Over the course of a single day, their conversation intertwines the most difficult questions with the boldest theories, delving deep into our religious and mythological history.

Why this

6 shared reasons

certification: NO country: FR crew: Raphaël Pillosio decade: 2020s genre: Documentary language: fr

Details

76 min NO FR FR Documentary