Movies: Michel Vandestien

Set against Paris' oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, while it was closed for repairs, this film is a love story between two young vagrants: Alex, a would be circus performer addicted to alcohol and sedatives and Michele, a painter driven to a life on the...

Set in France at the end of World War II Albert Dehousse finds out his father wasn't a war hero and his mother is a collaborator....

Aging beautician Angèle, already wounded by a long-ago romance, gets awkwardly dumped at a train station. Witnessing how she turns around a humiliating situation, younger sculptor Antoine becomes so smitten that he breaks up with his fiancée and sets...

By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he ...

This gripping historical drama recounts the story of Armenian-born Missak Manouchian, a woodworker and political activist who led an immigrant laborer division of the Parisian Resistance on 30 operations against the Nazis in 1943. The Nazis branded t...

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is swe...

Daniel leaves prison. He returns to Marseilles where Mathilda, his daughter, has just given birth. Nicolas, her spouse, a self-employed driver, is exhausted while Mathilda is a sales assistant on a trial basis. But, one night, Nicolas is assaulted by...

Marie-Jo is a middleaged woman living an ordinary life in Marseilles with her husband, Daniel and her daughter, Julie. Daniel runs a small construction business in which Marie-Jo helps. She also works at the local hospital. Outwardly their marriage i...

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; José...

This film deals with the aftermath of the Algerian war of liberation. Georges Montero, an Algerian-born Frenchman, manages an olive canning factory in Oran. He travels to Paris for a cataract operation. Marinette, his sister, and Belka, his friend an...

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 young journalist (Lespert) helps the French President compile his memoirs....

A Parisian lawyer moves to a working-class neighborhood in an attempt to shed his social conditioning and bourgeois values....

Al and Elsa have been a couple for some time, but the chances that their relationship will be long-lived are few. For one thing, Al is appallingly dependent on Elsa for his every emotional need. For another, Elsa is an incredibly elusive person, extr...

Several lives intersect when a middle-aged woman is left by her husband, and she decides to trek him down with the help of her equally troubled sister....

The grueling, emotionally torturous world of French preparatory schools provides the framework for this mystery. The deliberately rigorous courses are designed to prepare students to take the brutal examinations for entry into the elite Grand Ecoles,...

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....

At the start, Christine Blanc is a temp, her boyfriend has gone. Near the story's end, she's been offered a steady job, she has a fiancé, other men seem interested in her, she's passed her driving test, and, after she wins 1000 Euros in a scratch-off...

A documentary on the set of the ultra eventful Leos Carax film "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf", which spans three years of filming and knows an accumulation of disasters, increasing an initial budget of 32 million francs to more than 120 million francs....

Nag, a prostitute, walks the streets. One night, a violent man sends her to the hospital. There she meets Herve, a nurse obsessed with people's age and death in general. He falls madly in love with Nag and enters a world that amounts to very little....