Wacko

Two buddy farmers are visited by aliens who like their domestic cabbage soup.

For Pierre Brochant and his friends, Wednesday is “Idiots' Day”. The idea is simple: each person has to bring along an idiot. The one who brings the most spectacular idiot wins the prize. Tonight, Brochant is ecstatic. He has found a gem. The ultimate idiot, “A world champion idiot!”. What Brochant doesn’t know is that Pignon is a real jinx, a past master in the art of bringing on catastrophes...

Parisian everyman Antoine Doinel has married his sweetheart Christine Darbon, and the newlyweds have set up a cozy domestic life of selling flowers and giving violin lessons while Antoine fitfully works on his long-gestating novel. As Christine becomes pregnant with the couple's first child, Antoine finds himself enraptured with a young Japanese beauty. The complications change the course of their relationship forever.

A committed filmmaker struggles to complete his latest project while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.

It is 1943 in Paris. Like so many others, the Bourbelle family's home has been taken over by the Germans and they now live in their cellar. Little do they know that the son, Guy-Hubert Bourdelle, is far from being the cowardly hairdresser he pretends. He is in truth the Germans’ most feared opponent: le super-résistant!

The lives of a motherless young man, who's just starting to find interest in women, and his physically abused, poverty stricken friend, are mixed with more or less innocent childhood experiences and challenges most their age experience.

A woman involved with a terrorist group becomes dangerously close to the police officer guarding the bank they plan to rob.

Dressed as a clown, the clever rascal Grimm holds up the most secure bank of Montreal and takes 30 hostages. While confusing and ridiculing the police with his strange behavior, he calmly manages to rid the bank of a fortune. But then an unsatisfied companion arouses trouble...

This series of sketches introduces doctor Apfelglück and four of his patients... and their rather peculiar and disturbing problems.

After being discharged from a mental institution, a man is tasked by his mother to revive a struggling supermarket in Limoges. He must navigate unexpected responsibilities and the challenges of managing the store's staff.

Guillaume de Burlador is a private tutor who hits a low point sufficiently severe for him to contemplate a somewhat theatrical suicide. Instead he is taken off by flying boat to a mad French colonial possession bedecked by mad servants and crazy decor. Three educated and rather gorgeous women live there, and they hire him to tutor a young teenager, but more with plans to seduce him in mind.

Antonio returned to Portugal ten years ago with his lovely (and quite thin) French wife. She has since become quite a hefty specimen of womanhood, and his eye has lately been wandering to others. When his strong-tempered wife catches him with another woman (their neighbor), she bonks him on the head. In order to avoid further embarrassment, he pretends this has induced amnesia. He does so well in his pretense that his worried wife calls his old Parisian buddies (the rest of the Charlots) and asks them to come and help revive his memory.

The new era of a “Clown” that makes out of anything, comedy. With his absurd visual gags, he takes you out of your comfort zone, and has time to make you wonder with his beautiful lines of poetry.

In 18th century France, the Chevalier de Fronsac and his Native American friend Mani are sent by the King to the Gevaudan province to investigate the killings of hundreds by a mysterious beast.

A group of POWs in a German prison camp during World War II play the German National Soccer Team in this powerful film depicting the role of prisoners during wartime.

A prominent politician is murdered during a demonstration. The government and army are trying to suppress the truth, but a tenacious magistrate is determined not to let them get away with it.

Lucien de Rubempré, a young, lower-class poet, leaves his family's printing house for Paris. Soon, he learns the dark side of the arts business as he tries to stay true to his dreams.

A mysterious stranger works outside the law and keeps his objectives hidden, trusting no one. While his demeanor is paradoxically focused and dreamlike all at once, he embarks on a journey that not only takes him across Spain, but also through his own consciousness.

Mercenary soldiers Jamie and Drew are hired by a large corporation to liberate Zangaro, a small African nation, from an despot. Havoc ensues.

Elodie and Laetitia live in close love and dream of having a child. As Elodie discovers that she cannot get pregnant because of a health problem and encounters financial troubles, they decide to take a roommate.

Mutual attraction leads two married couples to swap bedtime partners.

At the end of the 15th century, a man and a woman, posing as traveling minstrels, are sent by the Devil to a castle to seduce its inhabitants.

When he inherits the family house and property after his mother's death, aspiring novelist Fane returns home with his bimbo girlfriend Lilas. He must care for his idiot brother Mo and contend with a greedy garage owner who covets Fane's property to expand his business. When efforts to buy the property are fruitless, the mechanic incites the townsfolk against the strange trio.

Lucas has invented a new computer language but at the same time he has been informed about his strange terminal illness during which he has been gradually losing his memory. Shortly after that he meets Blanche who acts as a medium in a bizarre traveling show. Dying Lucas follows her to the sea resort where they spend together several days and nights.

On planet Perdide, an attack of giant hornets leaves young Piel alone in a wrecked car with his dying father. A mayday message reaches their friend Jaffar, an adventurer travelling through space. Onboard Jaffar’s shuttle are the renegade Prince Matton, his fiancée, and Silbad, who knows Perdide well. Thus begins an incredible race across space to save Piel.

Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.

In the middle of the night, deputy Philippe Dubaye wakes up his old friend Xavier Maréchal with disturbing news: he has just killed Serrano, a racketeer with extant political connections. Serrano kept proofs of Dubaye's involvement in corrupt dealings and was poised to use them against the deputy. Xavier readily agrees to cover up for his old pal Philippe, but he soon runs into difficulties. Nobody believes Dubaye's alibi. And everybody -- influential personalities, powerful businessmen, dubious go-betweens and the police -- wants to get hold of the documents that served to blackmail Dubaye; by all possible means...

Young Jeanne falls in love with photographer Francis, who soon takes her with him when he emigrates to America. In a small town in the still wild west, they build up a small photo shop. Meanwhile, animal doctor David lives on his lonesome farm together with his unlucky wife. It takes years and two tragic accidents until Jeanne and David meet. She has already decided to return to France as soon as possible, but love, and fate, have other plans.

Vallois, a vice inspector for the Paris police, takes special interest in the plight of drug-addicted Lucky (Najda Tiller), whom he considers to be more victim than criminal. Taking it upon himself to wean Lucky away from narcotics, Vallois also wins her love -- and, incidentally, smashes the dope ring responsible for her addiction.

Vienna, 1906. A passionate love story develops between Franz Lobheiner and the young Christine. Lobheiner is, however, currently seeing the married Baroness von Eggersdorf. Upon learning of his wife's infidelity, the Baron von Eggersdorf provokes a duel with Lobheiner. But the former is no longer a real threat to the Baron. Lobheiner is now passionately in love with Christine. How will this love quartet end?

Paul Lamiani, a wizened mobster, is asked to return to duty following the disappearance of secret documents of extreme importance. It is assumed that they are in the hands of a friend of Paul. But the case becomes even more delicate when Lamiani's son is kidnapped.

A wealthy businessman's wife tries to cover up his suicide to cash in his life insurance policy.

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.

Manoel is an aging film director who travels with the film crew through Portugal in search of the origins of Afonso, a famous French actor whose father emigrated from Portugal to France and in process remembers his own youth.

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

The crossroads of three characters: an old doctor with a general view of the world, a mother having difficulties in recovering her baby that she abandoned, and finally her young sister, a high school runaway in the heart of the problems of the suburbs. All three will meet around the Platonic tripartition, taken up by Paul Valéry: "To know... To be able... To want... Here is the triple key".