Country: France – Page 5 – Wimbledon Film Club

A United Kingdom

In this romantic drama set in post-war Britain and Bechuanaland (now Botswana), writer-director Amma Asante revives a long-forgotten chapter of Britain’s imperial history which still has resonance today. British-Nigerian actor David Oyelowo (whose stand-out performance as Martin Luther King in Selma was seen as having been undeservedly snubbed by the Academy in the ‘Oscars so…

Elle

Based on Betty Blue author Philippe Dijan’s novel Oh, this controversial revenge melodrama is the first film in 10 years from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Total Recall, Robocop). Now in his late 70s, he retains his trademark blackly-comic, provocative approach to serious issues, in this case the effects of an attack…

Neruda

Inventive constructed biopic – part fiction, part fantasy – of the Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, from director Pablo Larrain (Jackie, No, The Club). A fictional inspector played by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal (star of previous WFC films Motorcycle Diaries and Even the Rain) is caught in a cat and mouse thriller in…

Letters from Baghdad

Explorer and mountaineer, linguist and archaeologist, the Middle East expert Gertrude Bell was recruited by British military intelligence to help draw the borders of Iraq after WWI. Arguably the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, she was at the same time an impassioned proponent of the region’s cultural heritage and defended…

Things to Come

Hansen-Løve says she wrote the role of Nathalie with Huppert in mind, while the character was inspired by her own mother, a professor of Philosophy. The film accords as much importance to silence as to words; to the poetry of landscapes – from low tide in Brittany to the peaks of Vercours – as to…

Frantz

A change of tone again from prolific director Ozon, (Potiche, 8 Women, Swimming Pool) this time a romantic mystery with a plot that twists and turns like a slinky. French veteran, Adrien, journeys to a small German village a year after the end of World War I, to visit the grave of his friend Frantz…

In the Fade

Akin brings us an important film giving focus to the impact of xenophobia rather than the much-charted rise of extremist views in western countries, in this case Germany. In the Fade has three distinct parts, first, a terrorist attack and the effect on a woman, Katja (Kruger); the second charts the woman’s pursuit of justice…

In Between

A gripping drama that’s winning audiences’ hearts around the world. Writer/director Hamoud has earned a lot of respect with her first feature film which packs a punch and entertains. In Between presents the lives of three young Palestinian women sharing a flat in Israel and living independent lives. The friends tread the delicate line between…

Faces Places

Unlikely couple 88 year-old director Agnes Varda and photographer and muralist JR (33) create a visual essay on the French in this quirkiest of road movies. Travelling throughout France with a box truck equipped with a portable photo booth and printing facility, they take photographs of the people they meet and places they see, and…

Transit

Transit is based on a 1944 novel by German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers, who draws on her own experience as a refugee. Petzold situates the drama in an historically indeterminate moment, superimposing past and present. There are no period trappings; the opening sirens could be sounding today, and the soldiers storming Paris look like contemporary French…