Jacques Pieiller

A dark tale of working-class life in Marseilles, a city in crisis. Interesting characters include a hard-bitten but compassionate fish market worker with a drug addicted daughter and a moody bartender with a shocking secret life.

A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes.

Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before.

From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.

Lucia and Elena are best friends since childhood. They take a car trip from Paris to the country. Their conversations are overtly intimate, but more revealing is their tacit understanding of each others' personality and desires.

Disguising himself as a geisha and introducing himself as Madame Mufiko, a certain Max Fox opens a school in Paris where he proposes to teach the Japanese art of love. He recruits a few students, boys and girls, to whom he teaches to imitate the positions represented on old prints. The young people set themselves to it with such ardor that soon the girls are pregnant. In addition, the school is put under police surveillance and the false Mufiko sees her true identity revealed.

In early 1920s France, an author, lying on his deathbed, looks at various photographs and is flooded with memories of the people and events that have shaped his life.

An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

À la vie, à la mort ! (1995) In Estaque, a northern suburb of Marseilles, stuck between oil refinery smokestacks and the Mediterranean sea, a handful of die-hards has taken refuge in a cabaret. There is José, the owner, a big-hearted gypsy who loves cars and women's bodies; Joséfa, his wife, the establishment's stripper despite her advanced years and Marie-Sol who climbs the hill every day to visit Notre-Dame de la Garde and beseech Virgin Mary to give her a child. There is Patrick, her husband who has been unemployed for ages but who is kind despite appearances and their friend Jaco who is having a hard time. His wife and daughters hate him for not keeping up on the mortgage repayments. Last but not least is Papa Carlossa who believes that Franco still rules Spain and fantasizes about bumping him off.