Category: Movies

Lukas Dhont’s girl : with lost body

Winner of the Caméra d’Or and the Queer Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, the Belgian Lukas Dhont continues his exploration of the theme of the body (started with his short films Corps perdu and L’Infini ) in this first feature-length light on an apprentice trans dancer who wants life to go faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ9VW8OVfUc

Lukas Dhont plunges her protagonist, Lara (delicate Victor Polster), 15 years, into the world of ballet, a medium that has a very fixed idea of ​​the body, between canons of beauty and frozen vision of what must be the masculinity and femininity. While working very hard, literally exhausting herself to fulfill her dream of becoming a star dancer, Lara does everything to ensure that the operation to bring her body in line with her gender takes place quickly … If it does not avoid some pitfalls on the representation of transidentity (Polster is top, but we regret that the role of a trans person is once again entrusted to a person cisgender, a sequence towards the end of the film is a little too sensationalist), the film is worth first of all because it finally shows what has not been seen in cinema so far:

In this part, which takes the form of a sweet portrait full of empathy (Lara is of all planes, and Dhont succeeds with subtlety to stick to his emotions), the most beautiful sequences are those which stage Lara with his father (Arieh Worthalter) and his little brother in moments of cohesion that are both of great simplicity and perfectly moving. Lukas Dhont knows how to instil a sensitivity and sweetness that sometimes reminds Céline Sciamma’s cinema. But this wadded cocoon has a dark counterpoint. Grueling discipline, brutal transphobia … Through Lara’s body, against which all the violence of her dance school, a highly competitive microcosm, clinically shown, Lukas Dhont reveals in their excessiveness the norms that would model, conform, but which suffocate and ruin; they are all the more exacerbated here that her heroine is both teen and trans. During training sessions, the filmmaker masks moments of weakness and films his face most often impassive, with the right look, dignified and focused. It is this tenacity to assert oneself, to refuse to let one’s identity fade away, that one will not forget.

Source TROIS COLEURS

Maria by Callas

A Feature film by Tom Volf

“There are two people in me, ‘Maria’ and ‘Callas’…”
A portrayal of an artist on a quest for perfection who became a global icon, a passionate woman with an extraordinary destiny, Maria by Callas is the story of a remarkable life told in the first person. Callas sheds light on Maria, revealing a diva as tempestuous as she is vulnerable—a moment of intimacy with a legendary figure, filled with all the emotion expressed by her unique voice.

A Season in France (2017) – uniFrance Films

Abbas, a French teacher, has fled war in the Central African Republic in order build a new life in France. While waiting to be granted refugee status, Abbas daily life takes shape: his children go to school and he works in market where he encounters Carole, who is moved by the courage of this man still haunted by the ghosts of his past.But if asylum is rejected, what will become of Abbas and his uprooted family? And what will happen to Carole, deprived of the home that she’d believed she had rebuilt with them?

Source: A Season in France (2017) – uniFrance Films

Explore France through Film

Take a cinematic tour of France with these classic and contemporary films that were made in various French regions. These contemporary and classic films will transport you far and wide, from Martinique to Brittany and Marseille to Guadeloupe.  Explore the map to find films that feature different regions of France and French territories. View a full list of film recommendations below

L’Or des Mers (1932) | Brittany
An outcasted fisherman living in a working-class town finds a treasure chest that everyone assumes is gold.

Amélie (2001) | Paris
A comedy about a young woman who discretely orchestrates the lives of the people around her, creating a world exclusively of her own making.

Chocolat (2000) | Burgundy
A romantic comedy about a young ds mother who moves to the fictional French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes with her six-year-old daughter and opens La Chocolaterie Maya, a small chocolaterie.

The Hundred Foot Journey (2014) | Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val
A modern-day Romeo and Juliet story, this film chronicles a battle of two restaurants in a village one by an Indian family and the other, a lofty Michelin–starred restaurant.

A Good Year (2006) | Luberon
A failed London banker inherits his uncle’s vineyard in Provence, where he spent many childhood holidays. Upon his arrival, he meets a woman from California who tells Max she is his long-lost cousin and that the property is hers.

Love Actually (2003) | Marseille
A Christmas-themed romantic comedy in which various people fall in and out of love in interlocking stories.

Jacquot de Nantes (1993) | Nantes
The portrait of filmmaker Jacques Demy follows his formative years in 1940s.

L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974) | Lyon
A French police inspector tells a quiet man that his son is a killer.

De Rouille et d’Os (2012) | Cannes
Ali, a struggling boxer and single father, develops a relationship with Stéphanie, a woman who had both legs amputated following an accident.

To Catch a Thief (1955) | Nice
Starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, this film tells the story of a notorious retired burglar who goes on a mission to clear his name after a series of jewel robberies is committed in his style.

The Boat (1981) | La Rochelle
A German war movie in which a submarine patrols the Atlantic Ocean during World War II, manned by a crew that must contend with tense conflicts and long stretches of confined boredom.

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) | Bergues
A French postman is assigned to work in Northern France instead of the coveted Cote d’Azur, and must handle his wife’s depressive state as well as an unfamiliar language and culture.

Saving Private Ryan (1988) | Calvados
A powerful dramatized re-creation of WWII’s D-day invasion and its  immediate aftermath.

Séraphine (2008) | Senlis
A historical dramatization of legendary painter and outsider artist Séraphine “de Senlis” Louis toiling as a maidservant in the homes of the bourgeoisie.

Bon Voyage (2003) | Bordeaux
In June 1940, an escaped prisoner follows his former lover on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Paris.

Plaire, aimer et courir vite (2018) | Rennes
Arthur a twenty-year old student has a summer affair with Jacques, a writer living in Paris with his young son.

Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) | Hérault
An inside look into French filmmaker Agnes Varda’s life through a combination of photographs, recreations and scenes from her films as she revisits French locales that played important roles in her life.

La Baie des Anges (1963) | Côte d’Azur
A young bank employee takes up a recent interest in gambling and falls in love with a divorcée in the trenches of her gambling addiction.

La règle du Jeu (1939) | Aubigny-sur-Nère
This film shows a bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II when the rich and their impoverished servants meet up at a French chateau for a party.

La cuisine au beurre (1963) | Martigues
Ferdinand returns to his hometown in London during his stay at the restaurant. Christine remarried to a Norman chef who runs Ferdinand’s restaurant.

La Rue Case-Nègres (1983) | Martinique
This film is a portrait of small-town native life under French colonial rule in Martinique from the perspective of a bright boy learning to balance the value of his roots with the education opportunities in the city of Fort-de-France.

La Sirène du Mississippi (1969) | La Réunion Island
A wealthy plantation owner is captivated by a mysterious woman with a shady past.

Siméon (1992) | Guadeloupe
The ghost of a music teacher encourages a young mechanic to start a career in music. [ . . . ]

Continue at: Explore France through Film

In the footsteps of Laetitia Dosch 

Actress Laetitia Dosch makes an appointment with Karine Vasarino for a night stroll in Lausanne. The Franco-Swiss actress lived in the Vaudois capital between 2003 and 2008.

Sur les pas d’une actrice aux multiples facettes. Sur scène, elle propose des spectacles qui expérimentent les limites. Chauffeuse de salle, animale, elle tourne actuellement avec “Hate”, pièce dans laquelle elle joue nue avec un cheval.Personnalité atypique, l’étiquette de dingue de service lui a longtemps collé à la peau. Mais depuis sa nomination aux César pour son rôle dans “Jeune femme” (Caméra d’or à Cannes en 2017), Laetitia Dosch découvre le côté paillettes et glamour de son métier.Elle sera prochainement dans “Nos batailles” avec Romain Duris. Mais la belle rousse qui se trouvait moche à l’adolescence ne se considère pas comme une star.Laetitia Dosch donne rendez-vous à Karine Vasarino pour une balade nocturne à Lausanne. L’actrice franco-suisse a vécu dans la capitale vaudoise entre 2003 et 2008.

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Laetitia Dosch : la belle et la bête

It may be a story of skin, porous membrane between oneself and the world. The skin that Laetitia Dosch has diaphanous, like most redheads, but that’s not the reason why this delicate, almost transparent envelope seems to work as a sensor. Rather a matter of sensitivity, obviously. On this evening of June, the young woman vibrates with all her being , under the big pines of the Domaine d’O, in Montpellier, at the exit of the representation of Hate  : a creation of which she signs the text and the staging, in which she plays, and which, after Lausanne and Montpellier, arrives at Nanterre, where it is not necessary to miss it .

The show is in his image: a total singularity. The beautiful, out of a painting Botticelli, plays, skin against leather, with the beast. In this case a horse named Corazon (“heart”, in Spanish), with a gray trout dress. They are both naked, which is more noticeable at home than at home. It would seem that Laetitia Dosch does not do anything like another, from the beginning.

“I’ve always been the weird of the family,” she says. Its heterogeneous environment and Catholic ultratraditionnel 8 th arrondissement of Paris. “At the same time, my family was strange, in its way, we lived with my grandparents, uncles and aunts, and in the middle of animals, alive or dead. At home there were two parallel worlds: the adult ones, and the animals and me. But it’s good that I have fallen in the ” cathos ” , like that, I could not reproduce any scheme, “she says with this light humor, falsely naive, which characterizes it.

Squeaky Spirit

It is indeed in her private Catholic high school, however, that she discovers the theater, which saves her from a lonely and mute adolescence. And it is in the theater that she plunges, with lost body, she who appears today as one of the muses of the young French auteur cinema. With an eclecticism, a curiosity, an originality that make him make the difference between very different forms, which nevertheless still marks his identity.

She played Shakespeare alongside Eric Ruf, the boss of the Comédie-Française, or under the direction of the director Mélanie Leray, while ferreting into the much more experimental and performative world of choreographers Marco Berrettini and La Ribot. And she wrote her first show, Laetitia makes a fart … , parody of stand-up, where she plays a humorist a little weak, who makes jokes about the old, the Jews and the Blacks. Laetitia Dosch does not mind having a squeaky mind. [ . . . ]

Continue Reading at: Laetitia Dosch : la belle et la bête