Josiane Balasko

After the death of her little boy, Anita wants to take her own life.

Two friends become soft drug peddlers in search of a drugs haul that will keep them rich for the rest of their lives. (bfi.org.uk)

Jacques Belin, presenter of a silly TV show, gets drunk after receiving an award and misses the train bringing his TV-soap-star fiancée... (imdb)

One very full day in the life of Denis Diderot -- the 18th century philosopher and libertine who wrote the first encyclopedia -- during which he dodges the law, the church, his wife, and his definition of morality. (filmaffinity.com)

Les Acteurs is a satirical take on the ups, downs, and numerous implications of life in showbiz as told by a variety of real-life French actors. (Tracie Cooper, Rovi)

Félix, disguised as Father Christmas, hands out leaflets advertising a sexy Christmas party. His place is taken by an African Santa Claus and he returns to his caravan only to find his girlfriend Josette about to leave him. When he comes after her, she takes refuge at "SOS Distress", run by two neurotics, Thérèse and Pierre. (imdb)

In the 1980 French countryside, farmer Jojo and his ill-tempered wife Lulu hate each other, though their respective interests speak against divorce. The only thing that keeps the oppressed Jojo from murder is the threat of the guillotine... (imdb)

Holidaymakers arriving in a Club Med camp on the Ivory Coast are determined to forget their everyday problems and emotional disappointments. Games, competitions, outings, bathing and sunburn accompany a continual succession of casual affairs. (imdb)

A car dealer, well-to-do and with a beautiful wife, finds himself attracted to his rather plain new temporary secretary. Despite her own commitments she feels the same and the two soon embark on an affair. Though it would seem it has happened before his wife finds this particular entanglement of her husband's very difficult to accept. (imdb)

What is going on here?!? French director, Michel Blanc (as Himself), just doesn't understand why his life is suddenly falling apart. This nightmarish comedy-thriller is all about identity. What defines a famous person? Is it their public self or their private self? What is the public's legitimate claim on their fame? With the glitterati of French Cinema starring as themselves, the anonymous faces in the audience gain a glimpse into the downside of public recognition. (imdb)

A French film remake of the British TV sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous"

Sequel to Les Bronzés (French Fried Vacation). A group of friends who met in a Club Med for single people reunite to go ski together. (imdb)

Hugo and Gigi, a couple of star actors, have been separated for a while, and their public has started to forget them. A producer tries to get their careers going again by uniting them in a play, but the aggression between the two is almost too much for the company to stand. (imdb)

Hélène, a distracted pill-popping anesthetist, almost runs down Gilles one evening on a Biarritz street. She is still numb from the drowning death earlier that year of her lover, a visionary architect. Gilles presses for a relationship, then backs away, deciding she could never love someone of lower class and limited prospects. But she does fall in love with him and gradually her depression eases... (imdb)

After learning of her husband's infidelities, a housewife invites an itinerant lesbian to move in with them. None of their lives will ever be the same again. (imdb)

A middle-aged single French woman (Balasko) falls in love with an annoying demon (Auteuil). (imdb)

Eric Vincent never knew who his father was. When he gets a phone call to pick up the ashes of an old man supposed to be his dad, he ends up chased by relentless killers. Catherine Hoffman, a female cop, is investigating the murder of a man who was burned alive. Francois Maneri, a private detective, looks feverishly for his missing daughter. Those three quests will collide in the most unexpected and breathtaking way.

Paloma is a serious, but deeply bored 11-year old, who has decided to kill herself on her twelfth birthday. Fascinated by art and philosophy, she questions and documents her life and immediate circle, drawing trenchant and often hilarious observations on the world around her...

Two frowsty middle-aged men, cousins, live and work together. In this ironic satire/drama, they are cowardly, tricky and mean-spirited, but at least they have each other. When they take to testing the alarm system of the bank that they work in after what is for them a particularly scary moment, their boss sends them away on a holiday. They manage to pick up and seduce a pretty hitchhiker before discovering that she is a runaway minor with a reward pending for her return. (Allmovie)

The characters from the first two films get together again, 27 years on. Bernard and Nathalie Morin, are the parents of a son who reveals a homosexual liaison; J.C. and Gigi are living together; Jérome Tarayre is divorced and seems unhappy in his new life; Christiane Weissmuller has joined an esoteric sect and wants revenge on Jérome who messed up an operation he performed on her; Popeye has become the proprietor of the hotel where the group has re-assembled, and is as unfaithful as ever. (Wikipedia)

On arrival in Paris, Paco, an international terrorist, is arrested, while his mistress Laura joins his accomplices. They all belong to terrorist and anarchist splinter group, Ravachol-Kropotkin, led by Paco. Meanwhile, Louie (Loulou) Dupin learns that her grandmother is dead and he is the sole heir of her Paris apartment. He also goes to Paris...

After having lost his job for having saved a child accused of shop lifting, Frédéric Barbier decides to become a school teacher with some funny results.The great comedy actor Coluche is excellent as a simple school teacher. (imdb)

She drove me into a corner, then forced me to go beyond my limits. She made me confront the absolute: love, sacrifice, tenderness, abandonment. She dislocated me, transformed me. Why didn't anyone warn me? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this?" Un heureux événement, or an intimate view of motherhood, sincere and with no taboos. (imdb)

A curator terrified of green plants, a ballet of Virgin Saints, a minister of Culture lost in an exhibition of sex organs, a car that has disappeared in the Rembrandt car park, visitors in love with the Impressionists, Gilbert and George, Picasso, Gauguin and Warhol - all are connected with an art museum. (imdb)

There are exactly 11 different slices of life in this comedic look primarily at the French and their mores. (Allrovi)

The middle-age detective Michèle Varin is a troubled and depressed woman in therapy because of the death of her eight years son four years ago. She has many nightmares, all of them related to death, and she has thought in committing suicide. When she is assigned to investigate the murder of a woman found hanging on a tree in the woods suggesting suicide, she becomes obsessed by the case. During the investigations, her state of mind gets worse and she confuses nightmares with reality. (imdb)

All five stories in this anthology comedy are tied together by their theme: they concern the encounters of a youthful psychiatrist (Thierry Lhermitte) with his patients, or with people so crazy they ought to be his patients. Each one is filmed by a different director. (Allmovie)

Lydie has just paid a considerable rent deposit for a new flat when her boyfriend breaks up with her. Now she is alone in a flat she cannot afford. So she starts looking for a flatmate and finally chooses Eva, a model. Eventually Lydie gets to know Eva's friends and that changes her life. (Wikipedia)

David is an accountant. He leaves town every Friday, pretending he is going to take care of his parents at their old people's home. But actually his parents are dead, and he spends the week-ends converting a chalet. He intends to live there with Lise, a woman he knows and loves since childhood. But Lise has just married another and has a baby. David's mad love does not see those facts as an obstacle... (imdb)

Walter (Michel Blanc), the leader of a nudist colony, enlists the help of left-wing militant Henriette (Jacqueline Maillan) in this political satire. He feels he has been snubbed by the government when he mistakenly believes he should receive the Legion of Honor. The release of the film coincided with the elections in France, but none of the political issues of the time were reflected in the subject matter. (Allmovie)

In 1958, there is an open referendum for the adoption of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic. The film follows the daily life of Irene, a communist activist who was rescued from concentration camps by the Red Army when she was young, and who is married to Bernard small Gaullist trader.

Film of Jacques Doillon, who entrusts a sequence on Nigeria to Jean Rouch and one on New York to Alain Resnais. The film has one complete duration of 87 minutes; script by Gébé with Gerard Depardieu, Josiane Balasko, Jacques Higelin and the team of Splendid. Originally a comic strip published in Charlie-monthly magazine, this film is an ecological and "tiers-mondiste" utopia . (KG)

3 days in the lives of 6 friends who are nearly 30 years old, live in Grenoble, and have a rock band called the "Why Notes?". They're to play in Paris at Charles's school reunion. In getting to Paris and back, the characters interact with Aimee's ex-husband and her abrasive, cruel ex-mentor, Louise's would-be lover who turns out to have a husband, Mickey's long-time lover and her children, Bertrand's Germanic wife and their children who speak no French, and Frederic's distant mother. (imdb)

When Nénette's mother dies, she seeks out her estranged father with her pet turtle in tow. Instead of her father, however, she finds her uptight, pharmacist half-brother Paul who does not want the intellectually disabled Nénette messing up his perfectly controlled life. But what if Paul needs a little less control and a lot more love?

An elderly man's innocent friendship with an eight year old girl is tarnished by the assumptions of a community when the little girl goes missing.

An unusually cold winter forces the french government to push the best housed people to accommodate some poor fellow citizens. The decree called "Le Grand Partage" creates some trouble. (imdb)

January 1966. In a Paris apartment, police discovered the corpse of Georges Figon, the man who broke the scandal of the Ben Barka affair & undermined Gaullist power. A year earlier, Figon is looking for a juicy blow. Close to the "middle" since his years in prison, he was given a large mission: to produce a documentary about decolonization, written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Georges Franju, with the help of the famous Moroccan opponent Mehdi Ben Barka, hired as a historical consultant.

The main story revolves around a trio of cops coming from the minority living in France (1 African Arab, 1 black African and 1 Asian) who are assigned the task to find a serial killer, who kills and rapes women in the french town Villeneuve. Their investigation leads to many comical and absurd situations, which are used to complete the main plot of the movie. (imdb)

Adapted from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, which deconstructs the language of love. (imdb)

The three men, friends of childhood, will cross, compare their personal experiences and question their life of couple, family and professional. (imdb)

In February 1976 in Djibouti, a school bus was taken hostage at the Somali border. The GIGN is sent on the spot, after 30 hours of tension a rescue operation is organized.

In the 19th century Pyrénées, a stagecoach stops for the night at an isolated inn run by a couple of murderous thieves. The husband wants to kill and rob them all, but one of them is a priest whom the wife refuses to see harmed. (imdb)

After a devastating fire in 1897 Paris, three women find their lives upended by betrayal, deception, and romantic turmoil. Inspired by real events.

A 48 year old singer songwriter in search of the Virgin Mary takes on a new identity as guitarist Pat, who has disappeared. (imdb)

Paul Château Têtard, 48, falls in love with a young woman working as a counter clerk in the subway. When he plans to marry her, his mother launches a private detective on her tracks to prove she's cheating on her son. (imdb)

Parents with empty nest syndrome find a clever way to make their kids stay interested: winning the lottery. (imdb)

Gracieuse, a farmer’s daughter, is disgusted at the way the horses she trained to the top levels of jumping are taken away from her. She meets the legendary trainer Franz Mann, who now manages a rich landowner’s estate, and with his help starts over in the world of dressage. (mubi.com)

Fourteen-year-old Sami (Samy Seghir) is a beur (a French person of Maghrebi descent) living in Chalon-sur-Saône, a relatively poor city in the Burgundy region. When his widowed mother (Farida Khelfa) takes a job working on a boat, she sends Sami to live with her sister Djamila (Rachida Brakni), who is married to Frenchman Stanislas de Chazelle (Denis Podalydès). They live in the upscale neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, an affluent suburb of Paris. (wikipedia.org)

In Paris in 1894, a young woman voluntarily allowed herself to be locked up in the Salpêtrière hospital in order to look for her mother. A ball is being prepared there.

Chloe has been living a successful life thanks to one trick: Albert Einstein is in her mind. But one day, he decides to move and chooses another body: Zac, a depressive beekeeper. (imdb)

Alice and Sandrine were abandoned 20 years ago by their mother. Now that she's coming back in Paris, they'll get their revenge. (imdb)

Michelle, a retiree in Burgundy, expects her grandson Lucas but a mistake ruins her plans. Her friend Marie-Claude's son is released from prison, reviving Michelle's purpose. (imdb)