Bad Seed

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to choose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

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 cabdriver and a cop race to Paris to rescue a love interest and the Japanese minister of defense from kidnappers.

Young provincial Charles arrives in Paris to stay with his cousin Paul while studying law. Paul is a decadent, bohemian pleasure-seeker who shows the meek, diligent Charles the thrills of city life. When Charles falls for Florence, one of Paul's acquaintances, relationships begin to shift.

Rendezvous in Paris

Romain, 31, a fashion photographer with terminal cancer, elects to die alone, preparing others to live past him rather than prolong the inevitable with chemotherapy or be smothered in sympathy by those who know him.

Depressed Alain Leroy leaves the clinic where he was detoxified. He meets friends, acquaintances and women, trying to find a reason to continue living.

In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.

Tanguy is 28 years old and still living with his parents. They think it's time he moves out. He doesn't, so they hatch a plan.

Remy, a rat, possesses a palate far more refined than that of his fellow comrades. He aspires to become a chef, one who creates rather than scavenges. When fate leads him beneath one of Paris's finest restaurants, he forms an unusual alliance with a young kitchen worker to pursue his culinary ambitions. As his double life unfolds, Remy must navigate the suspicions of the calculating Head Chef Skinner, the disapproval of Remy’s own colony, and the foreboding presence of renowned food critic Anton Ego, whose judgment can make or break a chef's legacy.

Lucas, a wealthy, 43 year-old divorced businessman, is irresistibly attracted to Elsa, a 38 year old renowned sculptor from whom he has commissioned a piece to decorate the reception at his office.

Liu Jian, an elite Chinese police officer, comes to Paris to arrest a Chinese drug lord. When Jian is betrayed by a French officer and framed for murder, he must go into hiding and find new allies.

Harlem's legendary Cotton Club becomes a hotbed of passion and violence as the lives and loves of entertainers and gangsters collide.

Lily DaCosta is a Hollywood movie star of the 1930s. Capricious and unbearable, she leads a scandalous life and makes life hell for everyone around her. Then along comes Deborah, her twin sister, a puritanical and shy farmer. The two sisters look so alike that when they swap lives, they lead a crooked journalist, a husband in need of money, greedy servants, and an ex-husband who has escaped from Alcatraz into a whirlwind of hilarious misunderstandings. Created for the stage in 1985 by Jacqueline Maillan, Lily & Lily has become a legend of boulevard theater.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 1962. When a high-ranking Soviet official decides to change sides, a French intelligence agent is caught up in a cold, silent and bloody spy war in which his own family will play a decisive role.

This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin, a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi officer developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned the German agent Max Richard to carry out his plan, but it failed miserably due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a French woman, Marie Louni, living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. Max lives at Françoise, a young French woman, who hides him.

Having first lost his wife then his job as a tweed tailor, Alex Ponttin has devised a novel way to keep himself in touch with society. He admits himself into people's homes, by pretending to be a relative or an official, and persuading his victims to give him a night's free board: He finds at first a lunch at the horrible couple Dumont, where a thief follows him for a robbery. Alex spent an evening in front of TV at Marie, mother of seven children. He runs from Marie to find an evening and a new bed at the home of charming but shy lesbian Caroline and her funny lover Gloria. To save her inheritance, Caroline - accused for her homosexuality by her horrible sister Catherine - tells her aunt Amélie, that Gloria is her secretary and Alex her lover. So Alex has to present himself nude in Caroline's bed. He saves Carolines inheritance. The police officers investigating the case are so terminally stupid that Alex has little chance of being arrested.

1911. Lenin organizes the first Bolshevik party school near Paris, in the small town of Longjumeau. Through a chain of historical parallels and associations, this time is intertwined with the events of the Paris Commune, the October Revolution and the political struggles of the post-revolutionary years.

A brash and precocious ten-year-old comes to Paris for a whirlwind weekend with her rakish uncle.

Successful writer/director Bernard Rougerie is at a creative dead end and decides to isolate himself from his wife in order to complete the script for his next film. Bernard moves into an apartment building whose tenants are in the midst of a revolt against their abusive landlord. Reluctant at first, he joins their cause and then becomes involved in an affair with young, unemployed resident Anne.