Paris Calligrammes

Not just another documentary on the French resistance movement, this film focuses on one particular group of underground fighters in France: those from Eastern Europe. Many were Jews and all had fled their native countries before the war broke out. They were among the most staunch and fearless enemies of fascism, as shown here in personal interviews and memoirs of war-time experiences. But the most famous of these immigrants were 23 who were rounded up among several hundred Parisians in 1943, tried for their activities, and executed -- all were immigrants under the leadership of the Armenian poet Manouchian. After their execution, Paris was papered with posters decrying these 23 martyrs as "foreign communists."

Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place of sensations into a modern cinema of attractions. The Prater’s history from the beginning to the present is told by its protagonists and those who have documented it, including contemporary cinematic images of the Prater, interviews with carnies, commentary by Austrians and visitors from abroad, film quotes, and photographic and written documentary materials. The meaning of the Prater, its status as a place of technological innovation, and its role as a cultural medium are reflected in texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner and Elias Canetti, as well as in music devoted to this amusement venue throughout the course of its history.

When an unexpected enemy emerges and threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins!

In the summer of 1939, 13-year-old Marie goes with her parents to visit her grandparents in a small town near Avignon. Marie discovers her femininity and falls for a young Jewish doctor, but he prefers Eva, Marie's mother.

After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Steve Rogers, aka Captain America is living quietly in Washington, D.C. and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy—the Winter Soldier.

American tourists David and Jack are savagely attacked by an unidentified animal while hiking on the Yorkshire Moors. After retiring to the home of a beautiful nurse to recuperate, David soon begins experiencing disturbing changes to his body and mind.

Chucky is reconstructed by a toy factory to dispel the negative publicity surrounding the doll, and tracks young Andy Barclay to a foster home where the chase begins again.

Marc and Laurent, two worrying misfits, break into a large isolated property in the middle of the countryside. Marc discovers with amazement that the place belongs to his idol, the movie star Jessica Melrose, of whom he is crazy. After a strange night, in the morning, Jessica meets the two "explorers" who will make her live a day of waking nightmare .

In the 23rd century, inhabitants of a domed city freely experience all of life's pleasures — but no one is allowed to live past 30. Citizens can try for a chance at being "renewed" in a civic ceremony on their 30th birthday. Escape is the only other option.

Dr. Peyton Westlake is on the verge of realizing a major breakthrough in synthetic skin when his laboratory is destroyed by gangsters. Having been burned beyond recognition and forever altered by an experimental medical procedure, Westlake becomes known as Darkman, assuming alternate identities in his quest for revenge and a new life with a former love.

The life of a weak-willed man is thrust into a downward spiral by the scheming of his manipulative girlfriend and her mother.

The story of the ascension to the throne and the early reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, the endless attempts by her council to marry her off, the Catholic hatred of her and her romance with Lord Robert Dudley.

After her return from school in Paris, a playboy finally takes notice of his family's chauffeur's daughter Sabrina, who's long had a crush on him, but he questions his more serious brother's motives when he warns against getting involved with her.

Jep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.

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.

A comedy set on New Year’s Eve 1999 in a luxurious hotel in the Swiss Alps where the lives of various guests and those who work for them intersect.

A chronicle of Gertrude Bell's life, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire in the Near and Middle East at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her knowledge of the tribal leaders is used by the British to establish the Kingdoms of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

When the Nazi high command learns in late 1943 that Winston Churchill will be spending time at a country estate in Norfolk, it hatches an audacious scheme to kidnap the prime minister and spirit him to Germany for enforced negotiations with Hitler.

Désiré is a fine servant and butler who regularly seduces the ladies of the house where he works, but then he moves on. This time he is working for Odette, the mistress of the minister of Posts and he is living a new situation. He has fallen in love with with Odette.

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

Since his wife's death, Andrew Blake is depressed. In an ultimate impetus, he leaves London to go back to France, in the house he met her. This journey through happy days memories won't go as planned.

Two 19th-century opportunists become serial killers so that they can maintain their profitable business supplying cadavers to an anatomist.

The Blood Countess and her maid embark on a quest for the red elixir of life and a book that threatens the vampire realm. Hot on their heels are a police inspector, two vampirologists, a vegetarian nephew and his therapist.

Victor, a disillusioned 60-something whose marriage is on the rocks, opts to relive the week of his life when, 40 years earlier, he met his true love through a company that allows customers to return to the time period of their choosing.

Near the end of World War II, General Dietrich von Choltitz receives orders to burn down Paris if it becomes clear the Allies are going to invade, or if he's unable to maintain control of the city. After much contemplation, Choltitz ignores orders, enraging the Germans and giving hope to various resistance factions that the city will be liberated. Choltitz, alongside Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, helps a leader organise his forces.

When, before the revolution, accidentally arrested, the philistine - a tsarist civil servant of high status - falls in deep, lethargic sleep. 20 years later he wakes up and finds himself in a post-revolutionary, still young Soviet Union. He is stunned. He is shocked. But a philistine always finds his way.

Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.

Life in a small Mexican village where joy and misery, hope and pain, passion and guilt, love and decay, life and death are mixed in the peasants life and two French citizens who end up stranded in there, during a typhoid epidemic.

Fred, the nephew of a senator,has murdered a Black man on a train. The two only witnesses are Lizzie McKay, a prostitute from New York, and Sidney, a colored man. Fred decides to seduce Lizzie in order to make her give false evidence according to which Sidney has attempted to rape her. The uncle also puts pressure on the young woman. After much hesitation, Lizzie finally accepts but Sidney, who has nearly got lynched, takes refuge at her home...

The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school, Michel Delassalle, is murdered by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after Delassalle's corpse mysteriously disappears.

Prisoners await execution by firing squad when they are captured during the Spanish Civil War in this drama taken from the novella by Jean-Paul Sarte. Pablo is a loyalist jailed after he searches for his brother. An Irish mercenary and a Belgian physician are his cellmates. Flashbacks recall their lives before the war as they spend their last moments on Earth waiting for their date with death.

A varied group of passengers boarding a ship bound for pre-WWII Germany represents a microcosm of early-1930s society.

Dedee is a prostitute, working in Monsieur Rene's night club on Antwerp's harbour. The porter is Marco, her pimp. Dedee is not happy, until she meets Francesco, an italian sailorman. They fall in love and Dedee begins to dream about an escape of her daily dullness.

A disturbed young woman is kept prisoner in a castle by her aunt for her money. The game-keeper, her guardian, tries to rape her but she escapes. In her flight she meets a man also running away, from two killers.

Paris, 1955. Fraudster Georges de Valera, hiding from the police, with the help of a correspondent for the reactionary newspaper Sibilo, poses as Minister Dubov, who allegedly escaped from the Soviet Union. Sibilo's daughter explains to Georges the purpose of the planned action: to slander progressive journalists with the help of the false Dubov. De Valera, not wanting to become a participant in the provocation, goes into hiding. But instead they find another candidate for the role of Dubov...

Julien Bouin, a former typographist, and his wife Clemence, who used to perform in a circus, hardly talk to each other in their small house, soon to be demolished. His cat Greffier being the only one he still gives affection to, he becomes the object of Clemence's anger.

Michel Contat is Emeritus Director of Research at the CNRS, ITEM/CNRS/ENS and a specialist of Jean-Paul Sartre whose novels and theater he has edited in the Pléiade edition and about whom he has written several books. With Alexander Astruc, he made the film Sartre par lui-même (1976) and, with Antoine Burnier, co-wrote the script of Claude Garretta’s TV film Sartre, L’Age des passions (2006). As a journalist, Contat contributed literary columns for Le Monde since 1978, and as an amateur musician, he was the jazz columnist for the magazine Télérama. His most recent books are Pour Sartre (2006) and André Gorz; vers la société libérée (2009).