A documentary about the French writer Jean Genet and his relations with the Palestinian revolution. One day after the September 1982 massacre at the refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Genet visits the camp. Suffering from throat cancer and having written nothing in years, Genet begins to write on...
The final film from expatriate American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in France in 1999. Kramer and collaborators tell the somber life story of Ben. After leaving his homeland as a youth, he is greeted in France by menial jobs in industry. In time, he opens a fruit market, finds a wife, fathers...
Nowadays, supermarkets are being built where cinemas and churches used to be. Logical evolution as consumerism is the religion of the 20th century: supermarkets are the cathedrals of the future.
Cédric is a child like millions of others. The only difference is that the little boy is seriously ill and must spend six months in a hospital. Fortunately, the medical staff are well aware that Cédric, like other kids named Steve or Dolores, must - above all else - live his child's life.
Located on the île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, the Paris Law Court looks like an impenetrable fortress. Like Kafka’s castle, it guards its secrets well. It is the place of power. The filmmaker, who worked there for several years as a crime reporter, is extremely familiar with its...
A voyage into the museum's reserves, and part of the extra work involved to mount the expositions after the renovation of the Louvre in the 1980s, when the glass pyramid was added to the classic buildings. From the preservation rooms through the frame and painting retouches by experts, to the...
“You buy a book. You don’t really know why. It lies around, and then one day you open it, almost absentmindedly. And there you are, facing your own innermost secrets.” So begins Stan Neumann’s cinematic adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel, Austerlitz. The vaulted and majestic...
On Good Friday in Burzet, a small town in Ardeche, the locals gather to remember Jesus's Crucifixion through solemn pageantry. Between 1980 and 2003, Courant filmed this community's annual reenactment of the Via Crucis 24 times.
“I talk about my 20 years of work with the filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in 1999. It is an account of the gestures and practices of this filmmaker. A way of recalling the central place he attributed to experience to better circumvent the pitfalls of the scenario. It is also the story of a...
Autour de 24 Passions is the making-of of my film 24 Passions . It was shot in 2003, on the occasion of the 24th year of filming this film on the Stations of the Cross of Burzet, in Ardèche. (Gérard Courant)