Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, The Gardener, Arrival of a Train at La Ciot Station and many more are on display in Lumiere's First Picture Show; a collection of firsts from the filmakers that started a business of film production, exhibition and distribution. The acknowledged birth of film history was December 28, 1895 when the first paying audience gathered at the Grand Cafe on Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, for a performance of films on the...

A woman who has never had much trouble choosing between love or money tries to teach a man the tricks of the trade in this sly romantic comedy. Irene (Audrey Tautou) is an attractive thirtysomething woman who lives a comfortable life by taking up with older and very wealthy men. She meets Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a handsome bartender who works a variety of odd jobs to keep himself afloat. She ends up enjoying a romantic evening with Jean, that is until...

This supplementary collection of films by pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès presents 28 films that have been recovered. Many of these films that have not previously appeared on home video, and have been mastered in high-definition yielding excellent results. The source prints themselves range from good to excellent, with two films presented in their fragmentary survival state.

his record-breaking comedy smashed the box office in France, where it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Cesar Awards. Although living a comfortable life in a charming town in the South of France, Julie has been feeling depressed for a while. To please her, her husband Philippe tries to obtain a transfer to a seaside town on the French Riviera, at any cost. When Philippe is caught red-handed while trying to scam an inspector he is immediately...

A French romantic comedy concerning an unlikely relationship between two Parisians, Variety called ODETTE TOULEMONDE "A Charmer! An adorable slice of magical realism that thumbs its cinematic nose at the intelligentsia." The title character (Catherine Frot) is a forty-year-old saleswoman, saddled with two children (an adolescent daughter and a hairdresser son), who spends her days hawking cosmetics from behind the counter of a Parisian department...

The largest-scale and biggest-budget production of the 1920s. Exhausted by the post-revolutionary life, engineer Los builds a spaceship to travel to Mars. A tragic accident forces him to urgently make use of his invention. On Mars he falls in love with Queen Aelita, while the Red Army man who came with him raises a proletarian uprising. The revolution destroys the Martian civilization.

Although he has a girlfriend who is expecting his child, Philipp, a young teacher in Berlin, meets Matthias and falls in love. After years of repressing his homosexuality, he must finally accept himself for who he truly is. The first and only DEFA feature film about homosexuality, Coming Out premiered on November 9, 1989 ... the evening the Berlin Wall came down. Philipp and Tanja teach at the same school. Both enjoy their work immensely, win their...

In Faat Kine, Ousmane Sembene, the unquestioned father of African cinema, calls his fellow Africans to a reckoning of the post-independence era at the beginning of a new century. At 77, he sums up 40 years of path-breaking filmmaking with a penetrating analysis of the interplay of gender, economics and power in today's Africa. Sembene accomplishes all this through the deceptively light domestic drama of Faat Kine, a gas station operator born, significantly,...

In this New York Times Critics' Pick, A 14 year old boy, struggling with gender identity and religion, begins to use fantasy to escape his life in the inner city and find his passion in the process.

In Moussa Toure’s powerful epic fiction film, a group of 30 men sail to Europe in a pirogue, facing the sea - and the possibility of never reaching their destination - in exchange for the myth of a better life in Europe. Baye Laye is the captain of a fishing pirogue. Like many of his Senegalese compatriots, he sometimes dreams of new horizons, where he can earn a better living for his family. When he is offered to lead one of the many pirogues that...