A man named Oscar spends a day in Paris performing nine radically different roles — beggar, assassin, dying patriarch, sewer-dweller — in a white limousine driven by Céline. There are no cameras, no audiences, no explanations. Directed by Leos Carax and starring Denis Lavant, the film treats acting as endurance, identity as costume, and technology as both tool and tomb. Shot digitally in Paris, it premiered at Cannes in 2012 and won Best Feature at Sitges.
A hyper-stylised 2001 romantic musical set in 1899 Paris, Moulin Rouge! uses anachronistic pop songs, saturated visuals and theatrical storytelling to explore love, artifice and sacrifice. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, it stars Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor as a poet and a courtesan whose affair unfolds amid the glittering chaos of the Moulin Rouge cabaret. Its craft — cinematography, editing, production design and costume — won multiple awards, including two Oscars. Though divisive in its relentlessness, it remains a defining example of early-21st-century cinematic maximalism.