Marcel Dalio

The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he's in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always "the Jew." When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America's idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?

Part one of a BBC documentary about Jean Renoir.

The Man You Loved To Hate blends revealing interviews, rare photographs, and clips from von Stroheim's legendary and lesser-known works to create a fascinating tribute to one of American cinema's most complex artists.

François, a Jewish lad, works for an insurance company and is engaged to a Jewish girl. His world is very ordered and secure and perhaps feels a bit claustrophobic. When he observes that a murderer has been declared psychologically incompetent and is to be placed in a mental institution, probably for the rest of his life, François feels the murder's plight very keenly. As time goes by, the murderer's situation is more and more unbearable to him, and he breaks off his engagement. Afterward, he has a liaison with a girl he has not known before, an act that somehow frees him. Now he wants to free the murderer somehow.

Following a car accident, four men find themselves in the hospital, where they sow discord. Meanwhile, their wives take full advantage of their newfound freedom.

A César award nominated short feature.

During a trip organized by a municipality to cheer up the loneliness of the elderly in summer, seven "little old men" visit Orly airport and decide to leave one day for Tahiti. Penniless, they get organized by living in the same apartment and stealing from stores to finance their future tropical adventure. But a private detective is on their trail, hired by the local shopkeepers who are fed up with the repeated petty thefts. The "gang" make him disappear and decide to leave for Tahiti.

In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.

A young woman, elegant, cold and inhuman, who is none other than Death, reigns over a universe dominated by electronics, the firm Thanatos Unlimited Corporation. A file in a computer and life stops. But death is also capable of knowing love. Thus she keeps Robert, a worker in eternal youth and forces him to love her until he falls in love with Marie, a barmaid. But can we defy Death with impunity?

In the north of France, the life of a nice family of marginalized.