Mixing 2023
Chanel’s first fashion show in Dakar in 2023 was historic – not least because of the historically significant venue of the Palace of Justice, a colonial edifice from former "French West Africa". Karine Silla's film about this event focusses on questions of identity, transmission and exchange, and how art and beauty can bring people together.

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Alone in Berlin 2016    star_border 6.7
Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.

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Judith Therpauve 1978    star_border 6.3
When her old resistance buddies come to her looking for someone to helm a financially troubled liberal newspaper, Judith (Simone Signoret) is at first reluctant, but for this old hero of the French anti-Nazi resistance, challenges are hard to ignore. She takes on the job, mortgaging her house to keep the paper solvent. When things take a turn for the worse, because of concerted opposition by conservative forces, she is forced to sell the paper, and she regards this as a personal failure.

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Flesh Color 1978    star_border 6
This film was presented to the Cannes Film Festival in the parallel section in 1978. It is unreleased.

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The Sorceror's Apprentice 1977    star_border 6
A thriller in which the characters are Latin-American exiles living in Paris. It is also a comedy about artists who play at revolution rather than actually participate in one

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French Provincial 1975    star_border 5.5
Director André Téchiné brings his usual obsessions -- including a preoccupation with the fortunes of the bourgeoisie -- to this episodic drama, which serves as a thinly-veiled portrait of France's economic peaks and valleys from the 1930s through the 1970s. Jeanne Moreau stars as Berthe Pedret, a simple laundry woman who marries Hector (Michael Auclair), son of a wealthy, upper class, Spanish immigrant family that owns a successful farm machinery factory. Through a series of vignettes, Techine depicts the passage of years, during which the ambitious working class woman blooms through several bold moves, such as negotiating a workers' strike settlement and using her alliance with the war-time French Resistance movement to increase the enterprise's prestige.

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