Le Forum - Your French bookshop in Australia

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS stars Audrey Tautou in a harrowing tale of struggle and survival for two immigrants who learn that everything is for sale in London's secret underworld! Part of an invisible working class, Nigerian exile Okwe and Turkish chambermaid Senay toil at a west London hotel that teems with illegal activity. Then late one night Okwe makes a shocking discovery, which creates an impossible dilemma and tests the limits of all they know!

Nominated For 3 Academy Awards, Based On The Best-selling Novel By Tracy Chevalier.

Griet (Scarlet Johansson) comes to Vermeer's (Colin Firth) home as an illiterate servant but her duties take her to the Master's studio. Here she shows an instinctive affinity with the artistic process and Vermeer arranges for them to spend more time together. His obsession with her beauty becomes obvious to Catharina (Essie Davis), his jealous and possesive wife and her scheming mother. Caught in the middle, Griet must also deal with the lust of Vermeer's patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson) who agrees to continue his patronage if Vermeer will paint Griet. Thus, the servant becomes the subject of Vermeer's most famous work.

Don Cheadle stars in the true-life story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsi refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda.

Retired organist and music teacher, Andreas Borg (Tingwell), discovers that his first true love, Claire (Blake), lives in the same city as he does.
Claire hesitantly responds to his plea to meet again, and it soon becomes evident that their love has not faded. Nothing feels as if it has changed; yet everything inevitably has. Knowing that time is precious, they embark on an affair as reckless and tempestuous as when they were young lovers.
A poignant homage to the human spirit, Innocence is a tragicomic tale of love and lust, of tenderness and hope. A passionate reminder to live life to the full.

Penetrate the moody, sensual world of Last Tango in Paris, and prepare yourself for "the most controversial film of its era" (Leonard Maltin). Nominated for two Academy Awards - Best Director (Bernardo Bertolucci) and Best Actor (Marlon Brando) - and exuding a sexual energy unlike any other film before or after, this is the scintillating classic that shocked a nation...and "altered the face of an art form" (Pauline Kael). He (Brando) is a 45-year old American living in Paris, haunted by his wife's suicide. She (Maria Schneider, Jane Eyre) is a 20-year-old Parisian beauty engaged to a young filmmaker. Though nameless to each other, these tortured souls come together to satisfy their sexual cravings in an apartment as bare as their dark, tragic lives. Caught up in the frenzied beat of a carnal dance they cannot seem to stop, these unlikely lovers take their passion to erotic heights - and depths - beyond anything they could ever have imagined.

Based on the best-selling novel by Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a story of deadly obsession set in 18th-century France. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, orphaned as a newborn in the streets of Paris, is alone in the world. Grenouille is alienated from others but blessed with a remarkable gift, his sense of smell. Eager to learn the art of creating sophisticated fragrance, he proves to be a savant who possesses an almost mystical knowledge of scent. When he discovers the most intoxicating scent he has ever experienced - the natural fragrance of a beautiful young girl - he learns that the only method to preserve her innocence and fresh beauty will require murder. Grenouille must capture the final ingredient for his greatest perfume - the essence of a beautiful redheaded girl whose wealthy father earnestly protects her. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer brings Patrick Süskind's international bestseller to the screen twenty years after its initial publication and literary success.

This double DVD edition (region 2 from France) includes trailers, a making of, interviews of the actors, producers and directors, a photo gallery and much more...

By Roberto Benigni - Winner Of 3 Academy Awards 1998: Best Actor, Foreign Film &dramatic Music Score - Lang?ita/eng Subt: Eng

An extraordinary cinematic experience no one should miss, Roberto Benigni's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL transports you to a world that even in its darkest moments, shines a light of hope and joy. A magical tale, it tells the captivating story of one man's love for his family and his ability to use the power of imagination to save them. Nominated for 7 Academy Awards in 1998 winning Best Actor - Benigni, Foreign Film and Dramatic Music Score. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL is deeply moving, intensely funny and an unforgettable masterpiece that will stay with you always.

Between war and peace, humour and hate, capture and surrender, life and death...lies No Man's Land. Set in the unforgiving trenches of the Bosnian-Serb conflict, this savage satire follows the story of three soldiers caught between two fighting lines.

Fleeing enemy fire, an injured Bosnian soldier named Ciki retreats to a trench, where he finds himself trapped with a wounded comrade and worse...his Serbian enemy.

With no way to escape and with his fellow soldier lying on a spring-loaded bomb set to explode if he moves, Ciki realizes he must do the unthinkable - trust his enemy - if he wants to survive.

Dennis Tankovic's Oscar winning No Mans Land easily takes its place alongside the original M*A*S*H and Catch 22, as films that have exposed the absurdity of modern warfare.

Special Jury Prize 2001 Cannes, Academy Award Winner Best Foreign Film 2002, Golden Globe Award 2002.

Argento's gory remake of the Gaston Leroux classic story. In this haunting and macabre

love story set in the late 1880s, the phantom is a man raised by rats deep under the Paris
Opera House who seduces and mutilates a beautiful singer who wanders into his subterranean world.

The richly deserving winner of the grand prize in the international Critics Week at Cannes 2004, SINCE OTAR LEFT (Depuis qu'Otar est parti) is an exquisitely bittersweet drama set in Tbilisi, the crumbling capital of the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. Three generations of women – the stoically beautiful Ada (Dinara Droukarova), her lusty mother Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) and whip-smart grandmother Eka (Ester Gorintin) – live together in a book-filled apartment. When news comes that Marina's brother Otar has been killed while on the job in France, Maria and Ada decide to conceal his death rather than break Eka's heart. Yet their lie soon spawns larger and larger ones.