Ivan Nabakov

Clara Bell is a busy Euro MP with a husband and child at home and a high powered career - but on a trip to Paris her ordered existence is overturned by a murder and a chance encounter.

A stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides the self," reads one of the film's Vedanta-sourced intertitles. And indeed, while the Pierre Clementi protagonist's inner life remains obscure, the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood that offers his temptations appears in harrowing detail.

Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.