A journalist must portray a sociologist.

She's a beautiful gifted performer, but her work is not the sort that invites popular acclaim. Despite the fact that she is unlikely to become famous, she enjoys her life as a performer who lives just outside the mainstream. Awaiting her backstage one evening is a Spanish painter who has seen her show and wants to make her acquaintance. They walk around Paris getting to know one another, and then the painter returns to Spain. Something about the man has moved Lady M to passion: she flies to meet him in Barcelona and he shows her his beloved Catalonia. This time, however, their relationship is as much about passionate lovemaking as it is about compatibility. So smitten is Lady M with her new man that when she discovers that the painter has a black wife and child, she is only a little bit taken aback and she invites his whole family to join her in Paris. Surprisingly, they do, and the number of people sharing their love and sexual appetites changes from two to three.

Bernard Nissille’s little gem imagines a love triangle between the director, the Queen, and the Bear during a staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. An actor who appeared with Bulle Ogier in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, Nissille enlisted the brilliant opera and film director Patrice Chéreau to appear in the film opposite Ogier, Michel Piccoli, and Emmanuelle Salinger, the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s The Sentinel.

To say that the renowned Impressionist artist, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) had a dysfunctional family is likely to do a disservice to ordinary dysfunctional families everywhere. In this unusual drama, the family (and one friend) of the troubled artist gather together to participate in the customary ceremonies that are performed when a close relative, in this case, Vincent, dies. While Vincent's brother Theo (Jean-Pierre Lorit) and his three sisters are genuinely grief-stricken, his mother (Maria Meriko) seems to be a truly stony character, and her cold contempt and disregard for her sensitive son appears to be just as great in death as it was in life. Fans of Vincent's art will be particularly appalled by the woman's attitude to her son's vocation, and more so by at her actions.

Four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

On a whim, the long-married Hélène decides to look up a former lover of hers. At his apartment, she is met by the man's grown son, Julien, who tells her that his father died just a few days before. Before long, she has become Julien's lover, but she is also increasingly becoming attached to the rather unlikely idea that Julien and she are genetically related. Meanwhile, her cardiologist husband cannot fathom her increasingly bizarre behavior. It is one thing to have an affair, even with a much younger man, but she seems to be edging ever-closer to the borderline between sanity and madness.

She was 18. They were in love and lived together for ten years. 20 years later, he receives a letter from her. L is very ill. He grabs hold of his camera and films while trying to make her talk about other things, about cinema and what’s become of those political struggles…

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting. Music in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting. Music in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…