Les Films 13

Filmmakers from all over the world provide short films – each of which is eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame of film in length – that offer differing perspectives on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

A foundling, raised in the circus, Sam Lion becomes a businessman after a trapeze accident. However, when he reaches fifty and becomes tired of his responsibilities and of his son Jean-Philippe, he decides to disappear at sea. However, he runs into Albert Duvivier, one of his former employees. He comes to realise that he has ignored the important things in his life.

In France during World War II, a poor and illiterate man, Henri Fortin, is introduced to Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables and begins to see parallels between the book and his own life.

A man and a woman meet by accident on a Sunday evening at their childrens' boarding school. Slowly, they reveal themselves to each other, finding that each is a widow.

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.

Released from prison under a New Year amnesty, a criminal tries to pick up the threads of a life changed not only by his daring plan to rob a jewelry store in out-of-season Cannes, but also by a very special someone he met there.

A successful film composer falls in love when he travels to India to work on a Bollywood retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction?

When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions.

A composer and a French film star, both of whom are married to others, meet and fall in love while shooting a film in the United States.

They knew each other long ago: a man and a woman whose dazzling and unexpected romance captured in the now-iconic film revolutionized our understanding of love. Today, the former race car driver seems lost in the pathways of his memory. In order to help him, his son seeks out the woman his father wasn’t able to cherish but whom he constantly revisits in his thoughts and dreams. Anne reunites with Jean-Louis and their story picks up where they left it…

Olivia, Irina and Masha are improving their acting skills. They no longer believe in Prince Charming, and their career is waning. Olivia works at the front desk at the airport and offers a wonderful plan: he would do so that friends will be aboard the Paris - New York plane and will sit next to wealthy men. Their task is to seduce the rich and pull them out of money. But the fraudsters do not suspect that Comissaire Bayard and his young assistant are closely watching them...

Before being judges, attorneys, or jury members, they are first of all men and women at a crossroads in their lives, with their dreams and their secrets, their hopes and their limitations, all beneath the same sun, each with their own dark side. In a lovely provincial town, during a jazz festival, life will juggle with their destinies.

A high-speed drive through the streets of Paris.

Salomé Lerner just finished writing an autobiography. She goes to a TV show called "Apostrophes", hosted by French TV showman Bernard Pivot. Pivot then imagines a film that could be created from her gripping story. A film entirely made of music because after seeing the young pianist Erik Berchot, Salomé believes seeing her long lost brother, who was a musician as well. A brother she had lost along with her parents in 1943. However, the Lerners did in fact escape the gestapo and might have based themselves in Paris...

Jean-Louis and Anne have had their fling and separated. Now 20 years have passed. He is still dating various women. She is now a big-time director whose most recent film was a very expensive bomb. She comes up with the idea of making a romance based upon her fling with Jean-Louis. She contacts him to gain his permission. Jean-Louis is still in racing and goes away for a desert rally while she begins filming. She finds the mood of their romance difficult to recapture in her film.

The film follows the exploits of Jacques, a car-mechanic turned pro-thief, and his Jewish co-conspirator Simon as their robberies, beginning well before the Second World War, take on a political coloration under the occupation.

Upon their release from prison twen­ty years ear­li­er, Gérard, Ary and Philippe asked them­selves if hon­esty was not the best rack­et of them all. Today, they are insep­a­ra­ble and scrupu­lous­ly above board. But Gérard learns he is ter­mi­nal­ly ill. Their friend’s days being num­bered, Ary and Philippe want to offer him one last love sto­ry… because, as Gérard likes to say : love is bet­ter than life.

22 year-old- Yan is trying hard to find his way in life: a job he likes, an ideal. In Saint-Nazaire, his home town, he vegetates, just like his father, an unambitious worker. His fiancée, Juliette, has middle class values and dreams of nothing but a comfortable married life. Dissatisfied, he moves to Paris where he becomes an assembly line worker at the Billancourt Renault car factory. Sick of the working conditions he and his fellow workers have to endure there, he soon turns into a leftist activist...

The movie starts with an interview with director Claude Lelouch. He pleads viewers not to disclose the plot of the movie after leaving the projection room. Even the movie's trailer shows only a long sequence of faces gazing speechlessly in space. "Like all my movies, this one is about a man and a woman", says Lelouch in the interview.