Pierre Banderet

The future of Marguerite, a brilliant student in Mathematics at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, seems all planned out. The only woman from her year, Marguerite is finishing a thesis she has to present to an audience of researchers. On the big day, a mistake shakes all her certainties and all her foundations collapse.

Three women, three generations, two secrets. In the early 1970s, a bomb exploded on board the Swissair flight 330 to Tel Aviv. Isabelle's husband also died. The young, very pregnant widow feared that her lover, the Palestinian activist Djibril, might be entangled in it ... Now, 47 years later, Isabelle finds out that her granddaughter Anaïs has converted to Islam. But why does the young student keep her new faith secret from the family? Anaïs's mother, Léa, immediately rings the alarm.

Jeannette is a single mother living in a working-class community in Marseilles; she tries to support herself and her two kids on her salary as a check-out girl at a supermarket and lives in an apartment complex where everyone is thrown into close proximity with everyone else. Marius is working as a security guard at a cement factory that has gone out of business; he's also squatting in the building, since the plant is soon to be demolished and he'll be needing his money later on. One day, Jeannette happens by the factory, and spotting several cans of paint, tries to take two of them home with her. Marius spots her and tries to chase her away, while she rails at him with curses against the capitalist system. The next day, an apologetic Marius appears at her doorstep, cans of paint in hand; the two soon become friendly, and a romance begins to bloom, though it quickly becomes obvious that Jeannette's romance novel fantasies are a bit off the mark from what Marius has in mind.

Her parents and a former lover try to help a woman out of an apparently unjustified catatonic condition.

Three men and a woman from a city in the south of France made a pact as teenagers to never forget that they were children of the poor.

In a hypermarket, a young overweight cashier named "La Goula" is the target of her colleagues' mockery.

From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.

In 1936, the political and marital tribulations of Léon Blum, elected President of the Council at the head of the Popular Front.

How the mothers of a deprived suburb of Marseille will create a solidarity committee under the aegis of the parish priest. Gathered in assembly, they will invent a solution to the endemic misery of their city.

A dark tale of working-class life in Marseilles, a city in crisis. Interesting characters include a hard-bitten but compassionate fish market worker with a drug addicted daughter and a moody bartender with a shocking secret life.

In Estaque, a northern suburb of Marseilles, stuck between oil refinery smokestacks and the Mediterranean sea, a handful of die-hards has taken refuge in a cabaret. There is José, the owner, a big-hearted gypsy who loves cars and women's bodies; Joséfa, his wife, the establishment's stripper despite her advanced years and Marie-Sol who climbs the hill every day to visit Notre-Dame de la Garde and beseech Virgin Mary to give her a child. There is Patrick, her husband who has been unemployed for ages but who is kind despite appearances and their friend Jaco who is having a hard time. His wife and daughters hate him for not keeping up on the mortgage repayments. Last but not least is Papa Carlossa who believes that Franco still rules Spain and fantasizes about bumping him off.

Wednesday is the day when children are not in school and stay at home. It is also the day when the parents are not there. In Nantes, in the spring, twenty or so carefree and boisterous kids between the ages of three and eleven take advantage of this day to make their parents go crazy. Emma, 9 years old and naturally romantic, decides that Roland, the little boy she met in the street, is unhappy and persuades her friends to adopt him. Victoria spends the day with Martin Socoa, an often distant father whom she learns to love. There are also Muriel, Bruno, Colette and Henri who take off and create panic in their parents' home, while Marylin lives the founding drama of her childhood with a mother of an unreal sweetness. Throughout these little stories, we realize that the world of children has its own logic, totally different from that of adults.

The story of Georges Mandel, an anti-Nazi French parliamentarian who refused to abdicate to the Vichy regime.

A young man sends a film to his parents after twelve years of silence. He wants to show them the man he has become.

Two scriptwriter friends with opposing personalities fuss and fight as they cobble together a script for a modern political film. Their arguments seem endless, they constantly stray from the plot, but the story slowly takes shape around garage mechanics at Moliterno & co. who fight a multinational in order to save their business.

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.

Jeanne is a woman who is driven by her very active conscience. She attempts to assuage her idealistic bent by trying out life as a nun, but this doesn't work out. After she leaves the convent, she takes a job at a factory, where the callousness of management spurs her to become a labor activist. Her efforts are marked by great persistence and fervor, but she lacks any kind of diplomacy or persuasiveness, and as the years progress, she manages to alienate everyone in her life. By the end of the film, there is only one way that she can see to resolve the horrible situation she finds herself in.

The lives of three people faced with an uncertain future. Marguerite, 17, is uncomfortable with her family enviroment and turns to God. Claire, who desperately wants a child, encounters again a former lover. Eva asks the unemployed Jacques, who has been left by his wife and his daughter, to find a missing friend.

Sylvie and Marie-Christine, two young girls abducted by force by pimps in order to make them participate in perverse shows, testify against their captors and are subsequently assassinated. Commissioner Beauclair and her teammates vigorously tackle the prostitution network in the Paris region. But the witnesses they meet are eliminated one after another ...

A young man is checked into a mental hospital for unexplained reasons.

After having perpetrated a serious crime, Muriel, François and René, childhood friends born in the working-class streets of Marseille, go their separate ways, until, 15 years later, they meet again when another crime is committed.

A collection of gay short films. The 6 short films are: VGL-Hung! (2007); Dear Parents, [Mes chers parents,] (2005); Into the Night (2002); Groucho (2007); Sissy Frenchfry (2006); Two Nights (2006).

A group of children from the same neighborhood meet a few years later. When the day comes, they meet again and take stock of their lives.

Le Grand Échiquier is a French variety television program created and presented by Jacques Chancel. It aired at 8:30 pm on the first channel of the ORTF from January 12, 1972 to July 12, 1972, then on the second color channel of the ORTF from September 1972 to December 1974, and finally on Antenne 2 from January 1975 to December 21, 1989. The program returned to France 2 on December 20, 2018 and is hosted by Anne-Sophie Lapix.