IFFR 1999

Catherine Breillat

A powerful and brilliantly acted film in which a young girl is obsessed with losing her virginity. On holiday, she both resists and loves a rather ridiculous playboy.

Catherine Breillat retro

36 Fillette

Inspired by Vigo's classic A propos de Nice, Breillat's camera sees what it is not allowed to see, a study in intolerance.

Aux Niçois qui mal y pensent

Breillat's most commercial and romantic film, but nevertheless a searing exploration of love and hate, love and death. An older, attractive bourgeois woman falls for a younger man with fatal consequences.

Parfait amour

Breillat shows that a woman's desires can also be ambivalent. Controversial film with real sex scenes.

A frustrated school teacher embarks on a series of sexual encounters. S&amp;M and rape fantasies played out – all explicitly shown by French auteur Catherine Breillat, in this exploration of sex and intimacy in male-female relationships.

Romance

Breillat turns the genre of traditional French 'policier' on its head, exploring the truth about physical passion and the brutal power of desire through the relationship of a seemingly frigid woman and a burnt-out cop.

Sale comme un ange

An unpolished film with a dreamy beauty, Breillat again working from her own story of a young woman who falls prey to an all-consuming desire, analyses sensual love in razor-sharp scenes.

Tapage Nocturne

Breillat's precocious and risk-taking début, typically frank and direct. In a sensual, intense first-person style she describes how a young girl discovers her body and her sexuality.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025