Claire Denis

In present-day Nicaragua, a headstrong American journalist and a mysterious English businessman strike up a romance as they become embroiled in a dangerous labyrinth of lies and conspiracies and are forced to try and escape the country.Read More »

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Paris resident Laure (Valerie Lemercier) has just finished packing her belongings in preparation for moving in with her lover, though she is oblivious to her apparent jitters at doing so. As she leaves her apartment for the night to join a pair of friends for dinner, Laure gets held up in traffic, due to a crippling public transportation strike. As she waits in her car, she finds a sense of serenity in the midst of all the chaos and begins to watch a number of people as they work their way through the congestion. One man in particular attracts her attention, as he also seems to be calmly regarding the traffic jam and its participants. The man, Jean (Vincent Lindon), gets into Laure’s car and transports her down a number of side streets and away from all the confusion — as both the strangers begin to feel an attraction toward one another.Read More »

A love triangle story about a woman caught between two men, her long-time partner and his best friend, her former lover.Read More »

A couple wakes up one sunny morning on the 15th of May. Apparently, they had the same nightmare and the day unfolds strangely. The next day, we are still on the 15th of May.

Graduation work from La Fémis.Read More »

In the sixties, in a suburb near Paris, Martine wants to lose her virginity.Read More »

The international breakthrough of acclaimed filmmaker Claire Denis, Chocolat is set in a remote town in Cameroon during the last days of France’s colonies in Africa.

Claire Denis’s award-winning autobiographical film traces a young white woman’s return to her youth in pre-independence French Cameroon, haunted by strong memories of black African Protee, the family’s “houseboy” and a man of great nobility, intelligence and beauty. Chocolat is a stirring & subtle examination of intricate relationships in a racist society and the human damage exacted on both the colonized and colonizer.Read More »

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This French anthology is a tribute to A Propos de Nice (1930), a classic documentary that took a poetic and sometimes satirical look at life in the French Riviera town. This version blends fact and fiction to chronicle life in modern-day Nice and is comprised of seven vignettes, each directed by an internationally renowned filmmaker. Only one of the episodes, “Reperages,” from Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Parviz Kimiavi, stays close to the style of the original film by Jean Vigo as it chronicles the experiences of a filmmaker who came to Nice to do research on Vigo for his upcoming documentary. Read More »

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A textured panorama of modern day Africa’s dynamic and volatile cross-cultural landscape, Claire Denis’s White Material is an abstract and elemental, if oddly sterile rumination on colonial legacy and socioeconomic stagnation. Unfolding in episodic flashbacks as second-generation coffee plantation owner, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) scrambles to make her way back home after a forced evacuation of European settlers in light of an escalating civil war, the film structurally interweaves the parallel lives of the Vial family, a band of roving child soldiers scouring the countryside for “white material” trophies from fleeing settlers, and a charismatic military officer turned rebel leader known as the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) who has gone into hiding to recover from injuries sustained during a recent skirmish.Read More »

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The movie begins with a startling, intimate sex scene. A hefty middle-aged man is making love with an attractive middle-aged woman. He is avidly concerned with bringing her to orgasm, each one worries that the other is worried that the other is taking too long—“I feel good. I’m good,” insists one of them— the sex ends in resignation. What’s startling about the scene is not its explicitness, which is not inordinate. It’s the way the characters are framed, in medium closeup, in compositions that emphasis the space between their faces as much if not more than their faces. (One is reminded of Elie Faure’s writing on Velasquez, quoted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou.”)Read More »