A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.
"Popeye" Doyle travels to Marseilles to find Alain Charnier, the drug smuggler that eluded him in New York.
Transferred home after a traumatizing combat mission, a highly trained French soldier uses her lethal skills to hunt down the man who hurt her sister.
In 1930s Marseilles two small-time crooks decide to join forces when they meet while brawling over a woman. Starting with fixed horse races and boxing matches, they soon find themselves doing jobs for the local gangster bosses. When they decide to go into the business for themselves, their easy-going approach to crime starts to change.
A gangster escapes jail and quickly makes plans to continue his criminal ways elsewhere, but a determined inspector is closing in.
The story of the struggle of an autistic girl and her brother trying to survive without their parents.
Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
Paris, 1984. A group of friends contend with the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
A Swiss nun falls in love with a Japanese engineer.
The story of a group of friends, all around 30, who live in the Le Panier district of Marseille, France. It's not a bad life, made up of slightly shady dealings, nights out, sun and just hanging out. But the neighborhood is an inescapable presence. Over a period of a few summer days, their carefree lives will plunge into a predictable tragedy.
In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.
Edmond Dantés's life and plans to marry the beautiful Mercedes are shattered when his best friend, Fernand, deceives him. After spending 13 miserable years in prison, Dantés escapes with the help of a fellow inmate and plots his revenge, cleverly insinuating himself into the French nobility.
Manu has been incarcerated for a year in a prison in Marseille. Back in Nantes, his hometown, he finds his friends and family that he left overnight. How will he reconnect, find the bonds that united him with these people whose lives have continued without him?
Sarah seems to have the world at her feet. She's young, bright, pretty, free spirited yet hard working, with a real passion for life. Then, in just one day, she loses her job, is told she will have to move out of her apartment, and discovers she is seven months pregnant.
Roberto goes to Marseilles to give a hand to his friend Xavier, wrongly imprisoned following a frame-up organized by his associate Villanova. Roberto sets out to seduce Villanova's mistress, but when Villanova is killed, Roberto ends up leader of the band...
In Marseille, the young Serbian-Albanian Adria Shala is an illegal immigrant traumatized by her past. Every now and then Adria recalls her life in Kosovo, when she was saved from rape by a deserter called Srdjan Vasiljevic in 1999. They move to Belgrade where Srdjan becomes a gangster, dealing weapons and becoming an assassin. Adria learns how to shoot and helps Srdjan with his work at first, becoming his mistress later.
In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.
When he learns of the death of his older brother Richard, Thomas sets out for Marseilles to identify the body. Having collected his brother’s possessions, he returns to their home town, hoping to recall their earlier life together. Here, Thomas insinuates himself into the company of Richard’s friends, whilst keeping his own identity a secret. As he does so, he begins to bring his brother back to life, although not all the memories are pleasant ones...