Don Giovanni
Joseph Losey
France – 1979Cast: Ruggero Raimondi (Don Giovanni), John Macurdy (The Commendatore), Edda Moser (Donna Anna), Kiri Te Kanawa (Donna Elvira)
Screenplay: Lorenzo da Ponte, Frantz Salieri, Patricia Losey, Joseph Losey
Cinematography: Gerry Fisher
Production: Gaumont, Caméra One, Opera Film Produzione, France 2, Janus Film und Fernsehen, Opéra National de Paris
Language: Italian
Duration: 185 min
Color: Color

Synopsis: Don Giovanni is a womanizing libertine who conquers the hearts of women throughout Spain. Accompanied by his manservant Leporello, he sneaks into Il Commendatore’s house with the intent to seduce his daughter Donna Anna. The young woman screams and wakes up the old nobleman, who challenges the intruder to a duel. Il Commendatore is killed a devastated Donna Anna vows avenge his murder. Giovanni continues to seduce and toy with women, including a former lover who is determined to see him suffer for his betrayal, and a peasant girl, Zerlina, whom he ravishes on the eve of her wedding. When they all band together to bring Don Giovanni to justice, he persuades Leporello to trade clothes, and the faithful servant barely escapes with his life. As Don Giovanni gloats over his own cleverness and gets progressively drunk, he suddenly hears Il Commendatore’s voice from beyond the grave and, mockingly, invites the ghost to dinner. Sitting at an extravagantly laid out table, Don Giovanny hears ominous knocks at the door. Leporello is cowers in fright, but devil-may-care Giovanni opens the door to find the statue of Il Commendatore. Giovanni refuses him entry, but Il Commendatore demands that the sinful Don repent for his transgressions.

Eyes without a face
Les yeux sans visage
Georges Franju
France – 1960Cast: Pierre Brasseur (Docteur Génessier), Alida Valli (Louise), Juliette Mayniel (Edna Grüber), Alexandre Rignault (Inspector Parot), Edith Scob (Christiane Génessier)
Screenplay: Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet, Pierre Gascar
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Production: Champs-Élysées Productions, Lux Film
Language: French
Duration: 84 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: After causing a car accident that leaves his daughter Christiane severely disfigured, the brilliant surgeon Dr. Génessier, insane with grief and guilt, works tirelessly to give the girl a new face. Aided by his assistant Louise, the good doctor kidnaps pretty young women, removes their faces, and tries to graft them onto Christiane’s head. All the experiments fail, the victims die, but Génessier keeps trying… until the girl begins to suspect what is really going on.

Only God Forgives
Nicolas Winding Refn
France – 2013Cast: Ryan Gosling (Julian), Kristin Scott Thomas (Crystal), Vithaya Pansringarm (Chang), Gordon Brown (Gordon), Yayaying Rhatha Phongam (Mai)
Screenplay: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cinematography: Larry Smith
Production: Space Rocket Nation, Gaumont, Wild Bunch Motel Movies, Bold Films, Film Väst DR/Flimklubben, Nordisk Film, ShortCut, Danish Film Institute, TV-Fond MEDIA Programme of the European Union
Language: English, Thai
Duration: 90 min
Color: Color

Synopsis: Bangkok. Ten years ago Julian killed a man and went on the run. Now he manages a Thai boxing club as a front for a drug smuggling operation. Respected in the criminal underworld, deep inside, he feels empty. When Julian’s brother murders an underage prostitute, the police call on retired cop, Chang, known as the Angel of Vengeance, to set things right. Chang allows the father to kill his daughter’s murderer, then ‘restores order’ by chopping off the man’s right hand. Julian’s mobster mother Crystal arrives in Bangkok to collect her dead son’s body and dispatches the living one to find those responsible and make them pay.

The Earrings of Madame de…
Max Ophüls
France – 1953Cast: Charles Boyer (Général André de…), Danielle Darrieux (Comtesse Louise de…), Vittorio De Sica (Baron Fabrizio Donati), Lia Di Leo (Lola)
Screenplay: Marcel Achard, Max Ophüls, Annette Wademant
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Production: Franco London Films, Indusfilms, Rizzoli Film
Language: French, Turkish
Duration: 100 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: In the Paris of the late 19th century, reckless Countess Louise, wife of General André, sells the earrings her husband gave her as a wedding gift to the jeweler M. Rémy to pay her debts. She lies to her husband that they were lost in the theater and he is about to call the police when M. Rémy visits his client and discloses the truth about the earrings. The General secretly buys the earrings again and gives them to his mistress, Lola, who is about to depart for Constantinople. Over there Lola gambles them away and they are picked up by an Italian diplomat, Baron Donati, who sees them in a shop window. Back in Paris, Donati meets Louise and they become lovers. He gives her the earrings, and Louise offers her husband another lie as an explanation: they were not lost in the theatre, she had misplaced them in a drawer. Seeing his mistresses’ earrings mysteriously reappear back in his wife’s possession, along with Louise’s blatant deceits, arouses the General’s jealousy and pride with tragic consequences.

Under the Sun of Satan
Sous le soleil de Satan
Maurice Pialat
France – 1987Cast: Gérard Depardieu (Donissan), Sandrine Bonnaire (Mouchette), Maurice Pialat (Menou-Segrais), Alain Artur (Cadignan)
Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Production: Erato Films Films, A2, Flach Film, Action Films, Centre National de la Cinématographie, Sofica Investimage, Sofica Créations
Language: French
Duration: 93 min
Color: Color

Synopsis: Donissan and Mouchette are bonded from the start, as he gazes across space and time at her killing her paramour. Donissan is a priest whose intense physical self-punishment is rendered all the more terrifying by his manifest physical strength. The fury of his religious devotion alienates his parishioners even as he seems to sense the presence of the Devil more clearly than that of God. Plagued with doubts, he seeks council with his mentor, dean Menou-Segrais. Having grown up poor, Donissan knows too much of the world’s filth, which complicates the purity of his theology. The bourgeois dean has the luxury of being worldly, sufficiently removed from harsh realities of life that he can embrace the contradictions of God’s teachings and creations. An unlikely gift from an encounter with an agent of Satan, Donissan has been given vision and insight, and the ability to heal and perform miracles. The priest blurs the line between good and evil, performing works in God’s name with power derived from the Devil. When he intervenes in the life of the sixteen-year-old girl who sleeps with older men, casually giving herself away even as she knows that she’s being used, Mouchette is ultimately undone by his misguided attempts to help her.

El Dorado
Marcel L’Herbier
France – 1921Cast: Ève Francis (Sibilla), Jaque Catelain (Hedwick), Marcelle Pradot (Iliana), Philippe Hériat (Joao, le bouffon)
Screenplay: Marcel L’Herbier
Cinematography: Georges Lucas Georges Specht
Production: Gaumont Série Pax Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont
Language: French
Duration: 74 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: In Granada, Spain, Sibilla dances in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child. The boy’s father Estoria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardizing the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman. Iliana however slips away from her engagement party to meet her real lover Hedwick, a Swedish painter. Sibilla, in desperation after a further rejection by Estoria, sees an opportunity to blackmail him by locking the lovers overnight in their meeting-place in the Alhambra. Unaware of Sibilla’s deceit, the next day the young lovers decide to elope together and propose to take with them Sibilla’s son—Iliana’s half-brother—so that the boy can be properly cared for in a healthy climate. She reluctantly agrees, and returns to her empty room at El Dorado where Joao, the cabaret’s clown, tries to force himself upon her. Knowing that she will not see her son again, she performs a last dance on stage to rapturous applause before going backstage to end herself at the point of a dagger.

The 5th Element
Le 5e élement
Luc Besson
France – 1997Cast: Bruce Willis (Korben Dallas), Gary Oldman (Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg), Ian Holm (Father Vito Cornelius), Milla Jovovich (Leeloo), Chris Tucker (Ruby Rhod)
Screenplay: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
Cinematography: Thierry Arbogast
Production: Gaumont
Language: English, Swedish, German
Duration: 126 min
Color: Color

Synopsis: Life in the universe is fragile thing, and it is periodically threatened by all-consuming pure Evil. In the twenty-third century the only hope for mankind is the Fifth Element, an alien force that comes to Earth every five thousand years to repel the darkness. When the aliens’ spacecraft is destroyed, a team of scientists regenerate the Fifth Element creature from its DNA remains, and the result is a being of uncanny grace called Leeloo. She escapes from the laboratory and stumbles upon the taxi driver and former elite commando Korben Dallas who helps her escape. Leeloo has allies on Earth, but so does Evil. The greedy and cruel industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg and his team of mercenary mutants do their best to frustrate Leeloo and Korban’s efforts to stop the spread of lifeless chaos. In the end, however, love proves to be the ultimate weapon, and it comes in limitless supply.

The Brain
Le cerveau
Gérard Oury
France – 1969 Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Arthur Lespinasse), Bourvil (Anatole), David Niven (Col. Carol Matthews), Eli Wallach (Frankie Scannapieco)
Screenplay: Marcel Jullian, Gérard Oury, Danièle Thompson
Cinematography: Wladimir Ivanov
Production: Gaumont International, Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica
Language: French, English, German
Duration: 110 min
Color: Color

Synopsis: Two clumsy French thieves, Anatole and Arthur, plan a spectacular heist: to rob a freight train which carries secret NATO funds from Paris to Brussels. They do not know that another team is planning the same raid, a band of experienced criminals that had earlier executed the Glasgow-London Great Train Robbery. That other team is headed by ‘The Brain’, a British criminal mastermind whose massive brain is so heavy that, when he has a strong emotion, he cannot keep his head upright. As it happens, for this exploit, The Brain has partnered up with the Sicilian mafia.

Zero for Conduct
Zéro de conduite
Jean Vigo
France – 1933Cast: Louis Lefebvre (Caussat), Gilbert Pruchon (Colin), Constantin Goldstein-Kehler (Bruel), Gérard de Bédarieux (Tabard), Jean Dasté (Surveillant Huguet)
Screenplay: Jean Vigo
Cinematography: Boris Kaufman
Production: Franfilmdis Argui-Film
Language: French
Duration: 41 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: At a strict French boarding school life is a constant power struggle between the student body and the staff. The friends Caussat, Bruel, Colin, and the sensitive Tabard, are particularly raucous and frequently receive grades of “zero for conduct.” The boys’ ill behaviour is a direct response to the authoritarian, bigoted, and corrupt demeanor of the senior staff, particularly the head master, and the dorm supervisors. The one exception among the teachers is Huguet, newly appointed at the school, who from time to time likes to imitate Charles Chaplin to lighten the mood in the classroom. Fed up with rigid, ineffective rules, the boys decide to take over the school on Commemoration Day. After ransacking their dormitory they barricade themselves in the attic, from where they raise their ‘scull and bones’ flag of victory. Now, during the celebration open house, they have prepared a special surprise for the guests and dignitaries visiting their esteemed institution of learning.