Producer · 1961

Pascal Caucheteux

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin · 2008

Arnaud Desplechin’s 2008 French drama follows the fractured Vuillard family as they reunite for Christmas after matriarch Junon is diagnosed with leukemia. Set over several wintry days in Roubaix, the film charts shifting alliances, buried resentments, and fragile intimacies among three adult siblings, their partners, children, and extended kin — all held in uneasy orbit by Junon’s iron will and Abel’s quiet endurance. With a dense script, naturalistic performances, and Éric Gautier’s muted cinematography, it treats family as a site of repetition, inheritance, and unspoken history.

13:00

Dheepan

Jacques Audiard · 2015

A former Tamil Tiger soldier assumes a dead man’s identity to claim asylum in France, posing as husband and father to two strangers. As caretaker of a troubled Paris banlieue, he finds himself drawn back into combat — not on a battlefield, but in stairwells and flats. Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winner treats migration as embodied habit, not political argument.

13:00

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Jacques Audiard · 2005

Jacques Audiard’s 2005 drama follows Thomas Seyr, a Parisian real estate enforcer who attempts to rebuild his life around concert piano after his mother’s death and his father’s murder. Romain Duris trained intensively for the role, playing his own piano sequences. The film reframes the 1978 American original Fingers through French social realism, emphasising physical discipline, linguistic barriers, and the uneasy continuity between violence and artistry.

13:00

A Prophet

Jacques Audiard · 2009

Jacques Audiard’s 2009 French prison drama follows Malik El Djebena, a young Maghrebi man who rises from illiterate inmate to de facto leader of the prison’s Maghrebi faction. Shot by Stéphane Fontaine and edited by Juliette Welfling, the film charts Malik’s calculated ascent through fluency, observation, and strategic violence — not redemption or revelation. Tahar Rahim’s restrained performance anchors a world defined by procedural realism, not symbolism.

13:00

The Red Turtle

Michaël Dudok de Wit · 2016

A shipwrecked man's repeated attempts to leave an uninhabited island are sabotaged by a giant red sea turtle, and his violent response to it sets in motion a transformation that reshapes his life on the island rather than ending it. Michaël Dudok de Wit's feature debut, made at Hayao Miyazaki's suggestion after he saw the director's short Father and Daughter, tells its entire story without a single word of dialogue across three generations on one stretch of sand.