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  Arts Programmes: French Movies at Alliance

      Alliance Française - Lien      

ÊTRE ET AVOIR (2002)

(To Be and To Have)

France, Colour, 105 min

Date:               Tuesday, 6 May 2003, 9pm and Saturday, 10 May 2003, 6.30pm

Director:         Nicolas Philibert

Cast:               Alizé, Axel (II), Guillaume (IV), Jesse (I), Jesse (II)

Synopsis:        This documentary looks inside the single classroom of a nursery school in Saint-Etienne on Usson, in Auvergne. Director Nicolas Philibert films one of these classes that gathers all the children of the same village around one teacher, and discusses the problems of overcrowding due to staffing cutbacks.

AMEN (2002)

France/Germany/Romania/USA, Colour, 132 min

Date:               7, 8, 9, 10 May 2003, 9pm

Director:         Costa-Gavras

Cast:               Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ulrich Mühe, Michel Duchaussoy

Synopsis:        Two systems: the Nazi machine versus the Vatican and Allied diplomacy. Two men struggling from the inside. On one side, Kurt Gerstein, a real-life chemist and SS officer, supplies the death camps with zyklon B while he tirelessly denounces the crimes and alerts the Allies, the Pope, the Germans and their churches at his family's and his own risk. On the other, Ricardo Fontana, a young Jesuit, a fictitious character who represents all the priests who had the heart to struggle against savagery, often paying for their courage with their lives.

MONSIEUR KLEIN (1976)

France/Italy, Colour, 123 min

Date:               Tuesday, 13 May 2003, 9pm

Director:         Joseph Losey

Cast:               Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Francine Bergé, Juliet Berto, Jean Bouise

Synopsis:        Paris, 1942. Robert Klein cannot find any fault with the state of affairs in German-occupied France. He has a well-furnished flat, a mistress, and business is booming. Jews facing discrimination because of laws edicted by the French government are desperate to sell valuable works of art - and it is easy for him to get them at bargain prices. His cosy life is disrupted when he realises that there is another Robert Klein in Paris - a Jew with a rather mysterious behaviour. Very soon, this homonymy attracts the close - and menacing - attention of the police on the established art trader.

DANTON (1982)

France/Poland/West Germany, Colour, 136 min

Date:               Tuesday, 20 May 2003, 9pm

Director:         Andrzej Wajda

Cast:               Gérard Depardieu, Wojciech Pszoniak, Anne Alvaro, Roland Blanche

Synopsis:        Action opens in November of 1793, with Danton returning to Paris from his country retreat upon learning that the Committee for Public Safety, under Robespierre's incitement, has begun a series of massive executions, The Terror. Confident in the peoples' support, Danton clashes with his former ally, but calculating Robespierre soon rounds up Danton and his followers, tries them before a revolutionary tribunal and despatches them to the guillotine.

BELLE DE JOUR (1967)

France/Italy, Colour, 101 min

Date:               Tuesday, 27 May 2003 – 9pm

Director:         Luis Buñuel

Cast:               Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page

Synopsis:        Severine is a beautiful young woman married to a doctor. She loves her husband dearly, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons while remaining chaste in her marriage.

 Content Contributor: Lien