IFFR 2005

Benoît Jacquot

An intensely wary and subtle look at the confusions of puberty, filmed in stunning widescreen black &amp; white. The Parisienne Lili falls madly in love with a kid who turns out to be a petty criminal. Before she realises, she is fleeing through Europe with him.

Benoit Jacquot Focus

A tout de suite

Based on a 19th-century roman à clef by Benjamin Constant that caused a scandal at the time. An 'amour fou' between the handsome young Adolphe and the riper Eleanor, who really belongs to an important French nobleman. With Isabelle Adjani in a beautiful leading role.

Adolphe

Contemporary adaptation of the novel by Henry James. Isabelle Huppert is the dying rich lady Marie, Michele Placido plays the well-meaning lover Sandro and Dominique Sanda is Catherine Croy, the beautiful Parisian woman who drives them together in the hope of getting a major inheritance.

Les ailes de la colombe

Discussions with and performances by the great British tenor Alfred Deller, founder of the legendary Alfred Deller Consort in 1948.

Alfred Deller – Portrait d'une voix

Jacquot's feature debut about a violinist from the countryside who dreams of fame and riches despite his limited talent. When he gets to know a poor woman in Paris and her daughter, the situation gets dramatically out of hand. Inspired by Dostoevsky's unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova.

L'assassin musicien

Based on the famous short story about a man who worried all his life about a possible catastrophe that would overcome him. In the end he finds out that this fear itself is the catastrophe.

La bête dans la jungle

The teenager Beth, with incredible dark eyes, grows up in three days. Beautifully intense film.

La désenchantée

Adaptation of an unknown novel by Yukio Mishima. The rather older Dominique (Isabelle Huppert) falls for the attractive young Quentin. The cinematography has great emotional and visual precision.

L'école de la chair

Benoit Jacquot films his good friend Marguèrite Duras while she talks, which is an event in itself. She talks about writing - the process, the loneliness, the grandeur, the insanity - with her well-known elegance, caution and large sad eyes.

Ecrire

Stenographic reports of the conversations that Louis Jouvet had with his actors at the National Conservatoire for Drama in Paris are mixed with classic comedies and plays, from Molière to modern.

Elvire Jouvet 40

A brother and sister see each other again after years and again feel guilty about their sick mother, who hung herself in their youth and whom they found in on their way to the cupboard in the hallway, their secret spot for ritual games.

Les enfants du placard

Classic play by Marivaux is moved from eighteenth-century France to the contemporary theatre. Sandrine Kiberlain disguises herself as a man to get to know Lélio, the man to whom she is to be married off. Isabelle Huppert is the mistress she has to seduce first to have Lélio to herself.

La fausse suivante

The girl from the title, just starting a new job in a four-star hotel in Paris, is followed for 90 minutes in a moving Bresson-esque film. Moving.

La fille seule

Yann Andrea

In 1944, a young British pilot crashed his plane into a row of trees by a French village. Every year he is remembered by the inhabitants. A story told by Marguèrite Duras.

Marguerite Duras - La mort du jeune aviateur anglais

Beautiful adaptation of Marivaux' incompleted film La Vie de Marianne. Virginie Ledoyen is Marianne, a beautiful young orphan girl who thinks she has aristocratic blood and volunteers to enter a nunnery to avoid being married off.

Marianne

In 1982 Jacquot went to New York to see the sixty-three-year-old American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham at work in a studio in Manhattan. He made a portrait based on interviews and rehearsals.

Merce Cunningham and Co

A businessman has just spent some time in jail, wrongly convinced for a fraud in the family firm. When you see just how cautiously his wife and brother approach him, you would think he had returned from the dead.

Pas de scandale

Catherine Deneuve approached Benoit Jacquot for the television film version of the story about Marie Bonaparte, a neurotic cousin of Napoleon and princess of Greece and Denmark, and her relationship with Sigmund Freud. With an important role for the psychoanalysis of Bonaparte.

Princesse Marie

Sade is usually associated with torture and sadism. Jacquot made a fictional portrait in which De Sade (Daniel Auteuil) in 1794, during an unknown period in his life, is portrayed as a misjudged proponent of the freedom of speech.

Sade

Humane, subtle and complex portrait of a marriage in which the balance of power between the partners shifts. A surgeon's wife is ill, but that evades his somatic observation. She seeks help elsewhere.

Le septième ciel

Idiosyncratic adaptation of the famous opera by Puccini, who wants to capture the magic of a live performance as much as possible. With the great Italian soprano Angela Gheorgiu as Tosca and music by the orchestra of The Royal Opera House. Shot in Londen, location shots in Rome and a performance in Cologne.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025