Le Forum

In this companion to My Father's Glory, renowned French author Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of childhood continue to captivate.

Devastated at having to leave the wondrous hills of Provence where his family had spent the summer, Marcel is elated when they return for Christmas and then Easter. Before long they are heading for their rural retreat every weekend, and the long journey there soon brings its own adventure.

As Marcel's affectionate reminiscences draw to a close, we are left with a wonderfully poignant conclusion to these classics of modern French cinema.

Jacques Demy’s ode to the classic fairy tale by 17th Century author Charles Perrault (Cinderella) comes to life with breathtaking brilliance. Digitally restored and re-mastered under the supervision of Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I), this epic tale overflows with dazzling color, elaborate costumes and an enchanting score by Academy Award®-winning composer Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Catherine Deneuve (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Indochine) stars as a Princess whose father, the King (Jean Marais), seeks her hand in marriage after promising his dying wife to only wed a woman more beautiful than she. Listening to her godmother, the Fairy of Lilacs (Delphine Seyrig), the frightened Princess flees to a neighboring farm and hides as a scullery maid, while wearing the skin of her father’s prized donkey as a disguise. A visiting Prince passes by, and an unlikely romance is born.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's unfathomable short from 1929 is a masterpiece of filmmaking guile and audacity, a shocking celluloid dreamscape that destroyed film convention with bizarre images that still resonate today.

The film opens with a young Buñuel sharpening a knife, a cloud cutting the moon in the night sky, the said knife slicing a women's tender eyeball before shots of gaping, ant ridden hands and mouths stuffed with armpit hair push the film beyond its surrealist limits. Young subversives hoping to influence Paris's ruling artistic elite, Buñuel and Dalí got more than they bargained for when their film redefined the entire movement.

Proudly presented for the first time on DVD in Australia, this art film masterwork is accompanied by a host of very special features, including two documentaries on the artistic life of Luis Buñuel and Savador Dali.

Belle de jour is an adaptation of the novel by Joseph kessel, Screen icon Catherine Deneuve (Repulsion) plays Séverine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs icy with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clément) and ignites an obsession that will court peril.

"This compelling mystery drama from writer/director Francois Truffaut is about a French mail-order bride (Catherine Deneuve) who is not what her husband-to-be (Jean-Paul Belmondo) expected."

Godard's brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny, in which five Parisian students, members of a Maoist cell, discuss the implications of the Chinese cultural revolution and the chances of using terrorism to effect a similar upheaval in the West. Dazzlingly designed as a collage of slogans and poster images, it was widely attacked at the time for playing with politics. But Godard was well aware what he was doing creating these 'Robinson Crusoes with Marxism as their Man Friday', and his film stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and impossible naïveté.