Le deuxième sexe : Sur les traces de Simone de Beauvoir

The latest work from Australian political satirist, cartoonist and filmmaker Bruce Petty contemplates our efforts to imagine the future using animated and live-action sequences, fiction and reality. An accident takes place during the filming of a documentary on the future and the film’s presenter (Rhys Muldoon) slips into unconsciousness. The actor’s muddled neurons recall fragments of his script, and he begins to consider humankind’s past and present imaginings of Utopia – an ideal and perfect state.

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Ján Kollár

Danielle Mitterrand, une certaine idée de la France

This is a story of a seemingly quiet and unobtrusive man, author of a colossal and partly unfinished literary work. We will try to trace back to the origins of his inspiration so as to understand why his work met and still meets with so much success. How did JRR Tolkien manage, through the power of words alone, to so widely instill wisps of magic in the midst of a particularly disenchanted 20th century?

The Channel Tunnel linking Britain with France is one of the seven wonders of the modern world but what did it take to build the longest undersea tunnel ever constructed? We hear from the men and women, who built this engineering marvel. Massive tunnel boring machines gnawed their way through rock and chalk, digging not one tunnel but three; two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. This was a project that would be privately financed; not a penny of public money would be spent on the tunnel. Business would have to put up all the money and take all the risks. This was also a project that was blighted by flood, fire, tragic loss of life and financial bust ups. Today, it stands as an engineering triumph and a testament to what can be achieved when two nations, Britain and France put aside their historic differences and work together.

Charles de Gaulle, the first president (1958-1969) of the Vth Republic, France’s current system of government, left his mark on the country . He was statesman of action and has been compared to a monarch. This film depicts the general’s personality through the great events of his presidential term, at a time when the world was undergoing considerable changes.

A cinematic portrait of farmer and writer Wendell Berry. Through his eyes, we see both the changing landscapes of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture and the redemptive beauty in taking the unworn path.

From infinitely small to super-predator, from the earthworm to the whale, from the blade of grass to the giant tree, Vibrant takes you on a journey to discover the biodiversity one country can host. Through the breathtaking natural environments of France, it is an exploration of the pyramid of life. It is also, and above all, an opportunity to marvel at these species capable of a thousand feats, subtly connected to each other and of which the human being is an integral part. A link that we have too often forgotten and that it is time to reweave.

Poet and author Xi Xi is one of Hong Kong's most treasured writers. Though also acclaimed in Taiwan and mainland China for seminal works like the essay Shops, her writings are firmly rooted in the spirit of Hong Kong. Leave it to Fruit Chan, another staunchly grassroots auteur, to make a documentary on Xi Xi's career. Chan sought out renowned critics and writers to discuss Xi Xi's works, starting with 1979's My City. He also juxtaposes photos of a changing Hong Kong with readings of her writings, and even playfully inserts characters from her stories into the film.

Nearing the end of his university studies, a soon-to-be graduate reflects on his life up to this point, all through the lens of a Handycam his father used to use.

At the close of Jacques Chirac's life, politician Jean-Louis Debré has wished to make a film to celebrate his friend, to tell the story of their friendship and professional understanding, and to make an intimate portrait of the former President of France through the accounts of a few very close friends. Thanks to Jean-Louis Debré's presence, Claude Chirac and some of Jacques Chirac's closest friends, famous or unknown, agreed to talk to the camera, sometimes for the first time, to evoke their untold-before memories and tell about the moments that bonded the two men for a lifetime.

Once upon a time there was a garden, a refuge, a safe haven - 'The Garden of the Finzi Continis'. It came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel recounting an unfulfilled love story between two young Jews in Ferrara, while fascism was raging in Italy in the late 1930's. In 1972, Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation of the book won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, the fictional space of the garden became so tangible that people from all over the world come to Ferrara to look for it. Fifty years after winning the Oscar, reality and fiction come together once more, as we walk through an imaginary garden and bring to life the book, its author, its main protagonists, history, love, friendships and betrayals.

Hermann Hesse, Nobel Prize winner in 1946, is not only the world’s most widely read German-language author of all time, with a total of more than 100 million books in print, but also, with Karl Marx, perhaps the most influential. The documentary follows his readers’ trail and at the same time the trail of the author who, like no other, has managed to become a role model.

Artist and life-long nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner is taking us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, to introduce us to places and people that shaped and inspired his art and politics. Traceroute wants to chase and question the ghosts of nerddom's past, present and future. An exhilarating tour de farce into the guts of trauma, obsession and cognitive capitalism. Features interviews with Matt Winston, Sandy Stone, Bruce Sterling, Jason Scott, Christina Agapakis, Trevor Paglen, Ryan Finnigan, Kit Stubbs, V. Vale, Sean Bonner, Allison Cameron, Josh Ellingson, Maggie Mayhem, Paolo Pedercini, Steve Tolin, Dan Wilcox, Jon Lebkowsky, Jan "Varka" Mulders, Adam Flynn, Abie Hadjitarkhani, Kelly Poots...

La Garoupe, a beach in Antibes, in 1937. For one summer, the painter and photographer Man Ray films his friends Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as Lee Miller. During these few weeks, love, friendship, poetry, photography and painting are still mixed in the carefree and the creativity specific to the artistic movements of the interwar period.

The brilliant Czech writer Milan Kundera has not given an interview in thirty years; nor does he appear in public. How did he become a legendary author? What is so unique about his books?

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM

An embittered journalist returns home to Hobart after losing his Melbourne magazine job. With nothing to do except think about his next move, he lands on the idea of writing a book about Tasmanian upper-order batsmen, and in particular the great man himself: David Boon. But soon he’s discovering there’s a lot more to his homeland than he once thought, and that everything he’s been searching for could be closer than he imagined.

Un peu, beaucoup, passionnément... Les Présidents et les Français