France

Kobarweng or Where Is Your Helicopter? stems from Johan Grimonprez’s visit to Papua New Guinea in 1986. Upon arrival in the village of Pepera, a local villager asked him, “Where is your helicopter?” Grimonprez later learned that a group of anthropologists had come to the village by helicopter in 1959, an event that left a lasting impression on the Indigenous people.

Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young  chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home, to Paris.

In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab watched her home burn down. One hundred and fifty years of family history went up in smoke. She seeks refuge in questions: when did this all start? How did the people of Beirut experience the siege? Each place then becomes a story, and each name is a memory.

Alice Diop is a French filmmaker of Senegalese descent. After studying colonial history, sociology, and film in Paris, she became an activist, championing gender and racial equality in film and the political mobilisation of young people from working-class neighbourhoods. With Vers la tendresse, she delves into the male territory of a Parisian suburb.

Mati Diop, niece of filmmaker Djibil Diop Mambéty, mixes facts with fantasy, as in the latter’s best-known film, Touki Bouki. A Thousand Suns thus becomes an homage to this classic film but, above all, a sensitive portrait of a man who, in his own words, “lost himself”.

The Black Panther movement was the most influential “Black power” organisation of the late 1960s, globally supported by opponents of U.S. imperialism. French filmmaker Agnès Varda canned this short documentary when she and her husband Jacques Demy were in California for his first Hollywood production.

As a journalist and filmmaker, Jocelyne Saab focused on vulnerable people, from displaced groups to war victims. Her work is marked by the actions necessary to document historical violence. In Children of War, she meets heavily traumatised children left behind after escaping a massacre in a Muslim neighbourhood in Beirut.

At the turn of the century, French-Swiss idiosyncratic filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was invited by the Cannes Film Festival to make a film to open the festival, “commemorating cinema entering its second full century.” Godard delivered De l’origine du XXIe siècle: a fifteen-minute barrage of re-edited footage of wars and Nazi atrocities, interspersed with clips of Godard’s own À bout de souffle.

As a painter, sculptor, and writer, Marcel Duchamp greatly influenced 20th- and 21st-century conceptual art. His interest in the ‘fourth dimension’ is evident in his film Anémic cinéma, which consists of a series of spirals within spirals rotating in such a way as to create an optical effect—a classic of experimental cinema.

He may never have enjoyed the fame of a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but many regarded Jacques Rozier as their equal. In his second short film, Rentrée des classes, a little boy throws his school bag into the river on the first day of school, which leads to a thrilling adventure.

Jean Vigo was a pioneer in what would later become the French New Wave. Zéro de conduite draws extensively on his own experiences at boarding schools and reflects Vigo’s anarchistic views of his childhood, sketching surreal acts of defiance in a repressive educational institution.

The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

With her films, pioneering journalist Jocelyne Saab gives exiled warriors and displaced people a voice. Her work is poetic but also has a strong awareness of her subjective role as a documentary filmmaker.

Fool’s Mate, seen by some historians as one of the first films of the French New Wave movement, is perhaps Rivette's best-known short film—and with good reason: its tight camera work captures a mysterious romance.

In A Kind of Testament, a young woman bumps into online animations that are clearly made from her private selfies. Vuillemin’s razor-sharp animated film scrutinises social media and digital personas and asks important questions about privacy and voyeurism.

In the short silent film Return to Reason, American dadaist Man Ray filmed barely recognisable night scenes in Paris. The almost total abstractions, such as enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or spinning objects, seem devoid of meaning or purpose.

The Octopus is a cinematic masterpiece that was restored in 2020. As a historical document, it not only depicts an utterly fascinating creature in all its splendour and mystery but also displays the infinite possibilities of the medium of film.

This French short film is highly regarded in many film history books. Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams.

Hungarian Flóra Anna Buda won no less than three major film awards (in Cannes, Annecy, and Sarajevo) with her dreamy short animation film 27. It is a story about a young woman exploring her sexuality to her heart's content: lurking in the background is a socio-political message about the soured housing market in France.

Like fellow filmmakers Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, French director Bruno Muel belonged to the militant Medvedkine, a group of socially engaged filmmakers active between 1967 and 1974. In Septembre Chilien, a documentary about the 1973 coup, he mixes official footage with clandestine shots of the rising opposition.

Following a premonition, a young woman tries to persuade her fiancé not to go out to sea in his fishing boat, but the boy ignores her and sets out. Soon, a storm occurs, and the girl frantically tries to find out his fate.

In a world where everything is forbidden except what is obligatory, a man recalls for what reasons he came to work in a very strange fast food restaurant.

A psychedelic meditation on the filmmaker's life and his detention in a prison in Italy in 1972.

Time travel, still images, a past, present and future and the aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world’s fate.

African migrants in Paris talk about everyday life and racism on the labour and housing markets.

Children dance to music under the watchful eye of their teacher. A young girl witnesses the scene and disrupts their ritual.

An adaptation of a play by Aimé Césaire, in which a revolutionary contemplates his life just before dying in a great collective disaster.

A trip to the Côte d'Azur, with its blue skies, beaches and endless sunbathing people.

A crane operator discovers a freedom he finds nowhere else, dozens of feet above the ground.

A sleeping man dreams of a city at dusk. Or is the city dreaming of him?

Jean Vigo's very first film. The silent documentary shows Nice residents in their daily routines, and the prevailing social inequalities.