Fragments for Venus

Marie-Lou Fontaine, director of a nursing home in the Paris suburbs, defies convention by adopting the 'Humanitude' method despite her team’s resistance. Her encounter with Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright, transforms her life. Together, they turn the facility into a symbol of resistance and humanity against the system’s limits.

Horn is welcoming his partner Léone into the hut he shares with Cal, when a man called Alboury appears. He stays there until they return the body of his brother, who was killed on the site.

A novelist attends the trial of a woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by abandoning her to the rising tide on a beach in northern France. But as the trial continues, her own family history, doubts, and fears about motherhood are steadily dislodged as the life story of the accused is gradually revealed.

During a book signing in Normandy, Annie Ernaux, 70, revisits her memories of the summer of 1958, when she was 17. That summer, she left her hometown to work as a camp counsellor. At the first party, the head counsellor set out to deflower her. Finding him handsome, she lets him do it, as if against her will... Her body becomes a foreign place for her, an offering to be sacrificed.

One night, an actor prepares to go on stage while a museum guard makes her rounds. The two gradually immerse themselves in these dormant institutions, on the fringes of shows and exhibitions.

In a dystopia Paris, this is about a campaign manager named Tristan who is knocked sideways when he receives an anonymous letter containing a positive pregnancy test. Potentially suffering from a fatal and incurable genetic illness, Tristan becomes obsessed with the idea of finding the woman who sent him this test. He decides to carry out an investigation, risking his love life and his career in the process.

Claire, a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper office in La Défense faces increasing scrutiny and isolation. The cold, grey offices amplify her loneliness, driving vivid dreams of setting the tower ablaze.

At the Comédie-Française, there is one golden rule: the play is never canceled. Unfortunately for Nina, everything else is—just three hours before the premiere of her first staging. An actor is stuck on a train, tensions explode, equipment breaks down, egos clash, and panic sets in. With no way out and time slipping away, Nina must hold the show together at all costs. Will she make it until the curtain rises?

Hortense has a big heart and no one to share it with except her cat, her embittered mom, and a group of homeless people for whom she prepares a gourmet dinner at the local church every week. While buying a nice bottle of wine, Hortense meets Jacques, a fifty-something, grumpy local cellarman. Eager to see him again, she attends a chaotic wine tasting in Jacques’ shop - meeting his best friend who clumsily tries to seduce her, and his new apprentice who turns out to have a rare gift for tasting as well as an unfiltered honesty. As Hortense and Jacques grow closer and closer, their past begins to catch up to them.

From the starting point of her admiration for the pioneering Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (1934-2018), the director poses a question: is cinema made by women really tougher, more violent? Seeking answers, she talks to great contemporary filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, Alice Diop, Céline Sciamma, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Monika Treut, among others. It becomes obvious that the cinema screen is a space for the projection of real social problems and power relations.

At the consulting service for immigrants at the Avicenne Hospital in suburban Paris, we observe the sorrow and powerlessness of the immigrants who come here.

A highly secure conference centre, nestled in the mountains. Hugo Radi combines a creative way of filming this locus of power with two fictional voice-over accounts to construct a dystopian world with real contours. This speculative film seems to draw inspiration from the most frightening elements of our contemporary societies.

Alice Diop's enchanting short film, a work of transcendent transformation, shows how the rough lines of Drancy station are immortalized in watercolor by the French artist Benoît Peyrucq. A tribute to a location fraught with historical and contemporary poignancy.

Gaël was five years old when his mother, Didy, died. Memories of her have since been lost in the fury of the civil wars, genocide and AIDS that ravaged Burundi and then Rwanda, precipitating her exile to Switzerland. Thirty years on, he ventures to reopen the pages of his family history by meeting those who knew his mother.

King Lear, as he ages, decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. However, the transfer of power comes with one condition: a declaration of love from each of them to their father. If Regan and Goneril serve him the speech he hoped for, Cordelia, his favorite, does not give in to the hypocrisy of her elder sisters. The restraint of his daughter triggers the anger of Lear who, humiliated, disinherits her.

In the business district of La Défense, a wave of suicides expose the fractures of a crumbling society. Strangers move through the streets like ghosts, bound by the invisible threads of paranoia. In the eerie glow of a collapsing city, destruction may be the only chance for rebirth.