Benoît Jacquot

She worked with the world’s greatest actors and directors: Buñuel, Mastroianni, Lellouche, Depardieu... The film guides us throughout her career with the filmmakers with whom she invented herself not to be a “cold blonde actress”, thanks to great interviews of many artists who crossed her path.

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It’s summertime, 2021. Isabelle Huppert plays Lioubov, Chekhov’s unforgettably heroine in The Cherry Orchard. In a near theatre, Fabrice Luchini recites Nietzsche. Both actors are premiering at Avignon’s Festival. When they leave backstage to stand out on stage, they are completely transformed. As everything seems utterly natural, audience does not imagine what happened before. By following their daily lives during the weeks preceding the premieres, Benoît Jacquot brings a singular perspective of the two actors and shows them like we’ve never seen before.

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In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are special operatives charged with keeping order throughout the human territories. On assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two undertake a mission to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and cultures. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

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Xavier is a 40-year-old father of two who still finds life very complicated. When the mother of his children moves to New York, he can't bear them growing up far away from him and so he decides to move there as well.

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Jeanne is interned in a psychiatric hospital. She claims to be Joan of Arc.

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Damien, a Chinese civilization professor, lives with his wife, Iva, a stage director, and their son Noé. The couple's relationship has drifted into routine that has drained it of love. Damien finds himself trapped one day by Iva, who orders him to ask his father, a senior member of the French Council of State, for help in preventing Zorica, a woman Iva knows, from being deported. But Damien and his father don't get on and are barely ever in touch with each other. This dangerous mission throws Damien into a spiral that will turn his life upside down.

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Do you know Lacan, which many consider as the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud? Beyond the myth, the legends and sometimes, the curses, this film by Gérard Miller allows us to discover his work and his personality, through the testimony of his patients, his students, and also his relatives. Born with the XXth century into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, a psychiatrist by training, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture, a friend of Picasso, Levi-Strauss and Sartre, Lacan was a great theoretician, an outstanding practitioner, and he remains the most modern, the most challenging and even the most sulphurous of psychoanalysts. The director Gerard Miller met Lacan thanks to his brother, Jacques-Alain, the most faithful of his students, who married his daughter Judith. Their close and intense relationship makes this film exceptional.

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A documentary about the life and career of film director Ernst Lubitsch

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Catherine Deneuve couldn’t care less about being a celebrity, but fame made her an icon long ago and she occupies a special place in our imagination. The star is not one to let others get too close, but when she gives you her confidence, she keeps her word. If Deneuve’s career covers a half-century of cinema, it also bears witness to the force of a generation that experienced the deepest transformation of mores. This portrait reflects her entirely. The story of a mystery and an adventure.

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Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.

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In this thriller, a UNESCO translator stumbles across a group which is hiding and supporting Nazis and facilitating their travel around the world. She had been given an assignment to study the work of a writer who recently had died, and the conspiracy is revealed in materials he left behind. She comes upon a young man who is going through the writer's papers, and she immediately assumes he must be one of the conspirators. However, he soon convinces her of his innocence in that regard, and the two together begin a search for the ringleader.

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Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person.

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The fortunes of a small theatrical company based in the Paris suburbs.

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The full soundtrack to Marguerite Duras' 1975 film India Song, about a French ambassador's wife in 1930s India, is here repurposed with all new cinematography. As we hear all the dialogue of a bygone movie, we travel visually through images of absence and decay, bereft of life. It's the ghost of a film, and a further commentary on colonialism.

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Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

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The sister of a manager who finds work for the unemployed, instructs her brother's employee to find unemployed people.

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A couple have a peaceful existence in a small provincial town. He is a teacher and she runs an opticians practical. Their life is turned upside when Belle, a friend’s daughter who is lodging with them, is found dead in her room. The husband becomes the prime suspect as the only one at home at the time.

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It’s summertime, 2021. Isabelle Huppert plays Lioubov, Chekhov’s unforgettably heroine in The Cherry Orchard. In a near theatre, Fabrice Luchini recites Nietzsche. Both actors are premiering at Avignon’s Festival. When they leave backstage to stand out on stage, they are completely transformed. As everything seems utterly natural, audience does not imagine what happened before. By following their daily lives during the weeks preceding the premieres, Benoît Jacquot brings a singular perspective of the two actors and shows them like we’ve never seen before.

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Accompanied by her lover, Suzanna, 40, views a Riviera beach house for her family's summer vacation. This day, this break in her routine, in this new house, will mark a turning point in her life. Based on the Marguerite Duras play of the same name, Suzanna Andler is the portrait of a woman trapped in her marriage to a wealthy, unfaithful businessman in the 1960s. She must choose between her conventional destiny as a wife and mother, and her freedom, embodied by her young lover.

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Year 1763. Forced into exile, the famous libertine Giacomo Casanova leaves Paris and travels to London, where he meets Marianne de Charpillon, a young prostitute to whom he is so attracted that he forgets about the other women.

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A playwright encounters a mysterious woman when he takes shelter in a chalet during a violent snowstorm and becomes obsessed with her.

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In the late 19th century, a chambermaid from Paris relocates to a remote household in Provence, engages in trysts and finds herself enraptured with a coach driver.

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A twist of fate leaves a hapless accountant romantically torn between two sisters.

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A look at the relationship between Marie Antoinette and one of her readers during the final days of the French Revolution.

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A wanderer named Timothee arrives in a French village in 1865 pretending to be deaf and mute. He uses tricks to hypnotize a beautiful young woman named Josephine and takes advantage of her until he is arrested and tried for his crimes.

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The plot revolves around Bernard – a schoolfriend of Olivier's who is preparing for his bac – discovering he is a bastard and taking this as a welcome pretext for running away from home. He spends a night in Olivier's bed (where Olivier describes a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable). After Bernard steals the suitcase belonging to Edouard, Olivier's uncle, and the ensuing complications, he is made Edouard's secretary. Olivier is jealous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.

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Ann leaves Thomas and everything else behind when she catches him kissing another woman. With her music and help from Georges, she begins a journey to find herself.

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On her birthday, a young actress learns her father is a Hindu man her mother met in India. She decamps to Varanasi to find him.

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A girl from bourgeoisie discovers the pleasures of banditism, following her lover in his lifestyle.

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Twenty-year old Adolphe finds himself drawn irresistibly to Ellénore, a married woman who is ten years his senior. Although she initially repels her young suitor’s unwanted advances, Ellénore soon yields to his charms and the two embark on a passionate love affair.

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A businessman convicted of a white-collar crime becomes a changed person upon his release from prison.

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A bored, sexually frustrated woman's life improves when she begins hypnotherapy and tries feng shui, but her husband's life unravels.

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In the aristocratic society of the seventeenth century, the fate of Marianne child who survived the deadly attack on a convoy.

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A young Parisian must make major decisions about pregnancy, a job and her boyfriend.

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Based on the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the tale recounts how its eponymous heroine avenges the death of her father.

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A worldly French teen is determined to escape from her current situation for a better life.

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This symbolic drama from director Benoit Jacques underscores the characters' human need for affection. Children steal lemons for the thrill, while women steal other women's men from them just to prove they can. Drug smuggling, clandestine love affairs, and two lovers involved with the production of Shakespeare's Othello carry on with their own off-stage tragedy.

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A 20th-century prostitute (Dominique Sanda) arranges for her lover (Michele Placido) to wed a wealthy, dying millionairess (Isabelle Huppert) in Venice.

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Julien seeks to reconquer Jeanne, his ex-wife, of whom he is separated and who lives with another man. He is prepared to go far to make it happen.

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Nicolas has an appointment with his sister Juliette. They are bound by a heavy secret of childhood: their mother committed suicide while their father had charged Nicolas to keep her. Since then, the father has chased him out and has forbidden Juliette to see Nicolas again.

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A dedicated clarinetist receives a valuable violin and has a difficult time deciding what to do with it.

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In "psychanalyse", a two part documentary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan answers to questions submitted by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller under the direction of Benoit Jacquot. The Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF, the french public TV) broadcast this program. This documentary and its text became famous because this is the only televisual experience practiced by Lacan. A fair amount is made of the fact that Lacan was renowned for his powers of seduction and what effect this had on transference in the clinical setting. According to some of the interviewees, he could be irresistibly seductive, so much so that some thought him "monster".

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