Although living a comfortable life in Salon-de-Provence, a charming town in the South of France, Julie has been feeling depressed for a while. To please her, Philippe Abrams, a post office administrator, her husband, tries to obtain a transfer to a seaside town, on the French Riviera, at any cost. The trouble is that he is caught red-handed while trying to scam an inspector. Philippe is immediately banished to the distant unheard of town of Bergues, in the Far North of France...
In a quiet little French town, two detectives are tasked with investigating the brutal rape and murder of a preteen girl.
Twenty-something Freddy is becalmed in a podunk French village where the only sign of life is the local amateur brass band and youth aimlessly roaming around the countryside on scooters. He has an intense sexual connection with his girlfriend but has no joy or passion to give her. When she falls for a handsome Arab youth a tragedy unfolds.
A highly intelligent teenage girl has an affair with a 40-year-old man.
While on a joyride with the headlights turned off, two men hit and kill another man carrying a satchel full of money. The two men decide to take the money and throw the body into a pond and bury the money in a coal hill. The next morning the police discover the body of a kidnapped 12-year blind girl, Melody, in a warehouse near the site of the hit-and-run. They determine that the kidnapper saw the girl's father bringing the ransom to him and also witnessed the hit-and-run and the men stealing the ransom.
After a conviction for theft, Merwan was expelled from France, where he had lived since the age of one, to Algeria, his country of birth. In a foreign country of which he knows neither the language nor the customs, he finds himself stripped of his belongings and on the street.
Twenty years ago, Robert left his home in the provincial northern town of Boulogne to make it as an actor. His career never amounted to much, as he managed only a couple of acting jobs on TV. Without warning, he returns to his hometown and drops in on his sister who is in the throes of a sordid affair with her married boss. Later, Robert drops in on his younger brother, who lives with his elderly mother. As the film progresses, it quietly, sensitively depicts Robert's disruption of the lives of the members of his family.
Mister Cok is the owner of a large bomb factory. Looking for efficiency and profit, he decides to replace his workers by sophisticated robots. The formers stare helplessly at the toil of the robotic labourers. But one of the workers does not accept being discarded so easily...
Cora is a teenager and has a lot of problems (mostly because of the relationship with her parents). One day she meets Katz, a hypnotizer who makes shows in the whole country, and his assistant Pedro. Then she manages to convince Katz to bring her with him in order to teach her his job. Thus Cora leaves her home without saying any word to her parents and begins a long trip through France with a very tumultuous relationship with Katz and Pedro.
Short drama animation directed by Vincent Bierrewaerts.
My name is Hélène and 1952 was not an easy year for me. First, because my parents decided to leave Montpellier for Paris but without taking me and my big brother Michel along with them. Why, I don't know... The fact remains that I had to leave the south for Lille, in the North, where my grandmother Yaya (her true name is Alice but this is the way call her) and my grandfather Georges were living. What I disliked most was that Yaya had a preference for Michel and that Granddaddy was too grumpy. In Lille I also got very upset when pupils at the catholic school I attended told me I was... Jewish. Jewish? I didn't even know that Jews even existed. And when I knew better about them (Michel was more informed than I was), what a shock it was when I learned that my two other grandparents had been sent to a concentration during the war. A little too much for a little girl like me. A sure thing is that I will never forget the year 1952, the year when I was seven...
The SAS (Section Administrative Spécialisée) were created in 1956 by the French army during the Algerian war to pacify "the natives". During the day, the SAS were used as treatment centres and at night as torture centres, in order to crush the Algerian resistance. The SAS were inhabited by French soldiers and auxiliaries (harkis, goumiers) and their families.
At independence in 1962, a few families of auxiliaries stayed on; the vacant buildings were occupied by families of martyrs awaiting the better days promised by the new Algeria. 46 years later, the SAS at Laperrine, in the Bouira region, still exists, a unique place inhabited by people who have taken refuge there. They have been joined by farmers fleeing the terrorism of the 90s. They all live as best they can in a place they did not choose, suffering the consequences of war.
Close to 40 years after the war of Algeria ended, in a factory workers' garden, in Tourcoing, a city from the North of France, French and Algerian men work on their piece of land. These men were the conscripts, National Liberation Front militants or "harkis" from a colonial war led by the French republic.