Film SocialismeMovies like Film Socialisme
- Key Features:
- Experimental film, Social commentary, Political allegory, Mediterranean, National identity, Philosophical, Non-narrative, Cerebral
- Tone:
- poetic, stylized
- Target Audience:
- Art house enthusiasts, Cerebral viewers, Political cinema fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Confusion
Film Socialisme

A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday... Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.
Film Socialisme
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby's cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin." - JLG

A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

Hours after the tragic death of their youngest brother in unexplained circumstances, three siblings have their lives thrown into chaos.

Daniel leaves prison. He returns to Marseilles where Mathilda, his daughter, has just given birth. Nicolas, her spouse, a self-employed driver, is exhausted while Mathilda is a sales assistant on a trial basis. But, one night, Nicolas is assaulted by taxi drivers determined to reduce unfair competition.

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

Set in France at the end of World War II Albert Dehousse finds out his father wasn't a war hero and his mother is a collaborator.

A young American woman traveling through Italy finds herself in a strange Mediterranean villa where nothing seems quite right.

Corniche Kennedy. In the blue of the Mediterranean, at the foot of luxurious villas, the young kids of Marseille defy the laws of gravity. Marco, Mehdi, Franck, Mélissa, Hamza, Mamaa, Julie : girls and boys dive, take flight, take risks to experience life to the fullest. Suzanne devours them with her eyes from inside her chic villa. Their free bodies, their excess. She wants to be part of them. She will be part of them.

Paul, a young idealist trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, takes a job interviewing people for a marketing research firm. He moves in with aspiring pop singer Madeleine. Paul, however, is disillusioned by the growing commercialism in society, while Madeleine just wants to be successful. The story is told in a series of 15 unrelated vignettes.

A celebrity journalist, juggling her busy career and personal life, has her life over-turned by a freak car accident.

A universal theme: a story of people trapped in an inhuman network of power. The brutal circle of the Eurogroup meetings, who impose on Greece the dictatorship of austerity, where humanity and compassion are utterly disregarded. A claustrophobic trap with no way out, exerting pressures on the protagonists which finally divide them.

A college student gets pregnant without having intercourse, affecting people close and unrelated to her in different ways.

Three friends navigate mid-life crises: a blocked writer, a disillusioned doctor, and a charming man facing bankruptcy and divorce. As their struggles strain friendships, a younger man captures the attention of one friend's wife, complicating their lives further.

Ayiva recently left his home in Burkina Faso in search of a way to provide for his sister and his daughter. He takes advantage of his position in an illegal smuggling operation to get himself and his best friend Abas off of the continent. Ayiva adapts to life in Italy, but when tensions with the local community rise, things become increasingly dangerous. Determined to make his new situation work he attempts to weather the storm, but it has its costs.

Four separate stories deal with stereotypical ideas about Jews: their alleged influence on politics, the stereotype of Jewish business-mindedness, the Mossad, the Jewish world conspiracy and the memory of the Holocaust.

By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.

While on a Mediterranean vacation, a seemingly happy boyfriend and girlfriend find their connection to one another tested as they bond with another couple.

During the events of May 1968 in France, different worldviews of conflicting relatives collide in their family estate.

A prominent politician is murdered during a demonstration. The government and army are trying to suppress the truth. But, a tenacious magistrate is determined to not to let them get away with it.

Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.

Giuseppe Di Noi, an Italian surveyor living in Swiden, gets arrested at the border while going back to Italy with his family for a vacation. But can someone tell the man why?

Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.

As everyone knows, children make no difference between social classes, skin colors or religions. But then why does Corentin, Paul and Sofia's nine-year-old son, only have friends like him at Bagnolet's school? And when his friends all leave for a private school in Paris, his parents are frightened. From now on, Corentin is the only one in his class. But the only what?

The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.

A local activist and a budding young mayor clash over the best path forward for their impoverished suburb.

Bloch, an Israeli secret agent, seeks refuge in the French embassy in Libya to escape being killed. Augier, his French opposite number, has to get him to safety in a diplomatic suitcase.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

While two theater groups rehearse plays by Aeschylus, two solitary individuals wander the Parisian streets hustling the populace for cash.

After a love affair ends badly, a young Parisian named Paul sinks into the same kind of deep depression that led his sister to kill herself. He moves back home with his father and aimless brother Jonathan but refuses to get out of bed.

Dreams and reality collide as a young woman navigates a tumultuous relationship amid rising social tensions, protests and tragedies in Paris.

Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.

In the second of Rohmer's moral tales, he examines the relationship between two friends and a girl who at first appears easily exploited. It is a complex tale of feelings and misconceptions, acted out within the head of the main character, as part of Rohmer's attempt to more easily simulate the mindscape quality of literature within a film.

After losing a finger in a work accident, an Italian worker becomes increasingly involved in political and revolutionary groups.

The head of a giant European investment bank desperately clings to power when an American hedge fund company tries to buy them out.

Some young folks, tired of the society they're living in, plan a bomb attack over Paris before taking shelter for a night in a shopping center.

Jeanne, a shy young woman, works as a night guard at an amusement park and has a close relationship with her mother. While no man can compete with this opposed duo, Jeanne begins to develop strange romantic feelings for Jumbo, the latest attraction at the theme park...

Desperate to break free from the poverty of his homeland, Elias boards a ramshackle people-smuggling trawler to France. But when the boat is raided by police, Elias leaps into the ocean, eventually finding himself washed up on a Mediterranean beach resort called Eden. So begins Elias odyssesy across Western Europe to Paris, where wondrous promise, helpful new friends and perilous dangers await him every step of the way.

Sam, a freelance journalist, decides to investigate the growing phenomenon of disaffected youth joining extremist groups. He infiltrates a group of four young people who have been tasked with the creation of a jihadist cell and whose mission is to destabilise the city centre of Paris.

The adventures of an upper-class suburban family abruptly confronted with the younger brother's discovery of his homosexuality, the elder sister's suicide attempt and sadomasochist tendencies, and the intrusion of a very free-spirited maid and her husband. And it all started with the arrival in the family of an innocent looking rat.

As a heat wave brings a Marseille neighbourhood to the boil, three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbours from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair.

We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.

A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.

It all began when camcorders replaced cameras. Making TV programs then became within everyone's reach. Jean-Lou, Yasmina, Victor, Clara, Adonis, and the others didn't only want to create their own television channel, they above all wanted to make a revolution. Thus Télé Gaucho was born, as anarchic and provocative as the main channels were conformist and reactionary. Five years of mayhem, brutal pirate TV demonstrations, drunken parties, and thwarted love.. And that was my idyllic interlude.

Four short films by four different directors dealing with the principles of modern life.

A look at the sexual and professional lives of three people — a television director, his ex-girlfriend, and a sex worker.

A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.

Gab has a well-ordered life: a fiancée, a wealthy family. Leïla, who struggles to juggle her studies, odd jobs, and a brother to support, does not allow herself to live her own life... When Gab meets Leïla, it is a clash of worlds, the beginning of a great love story that will collide violently with reality.

A young filmmaker in 1960s Paris juggles directing a cheesy sci-fi debacle, directing his own personal art film, coping with his crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, and a new-found infatuation with the sci-fi film's starlet.

A stowaway sneaks aboard a ship departing on a cruise down the Vistula River. The captain takes him for a Communist Party cultural coordinator and the intruder gladly adapts to his new role, immediately setting to work at manipulating the passengers and crew into silly and vaguely humiliating games. Before long, Tym has got everyone under his thumb and created his own comedic dictatorship.

18-year-old Lina arrives in Paris for her studies. She comes to look for what she has never found in Lebanon, her country of origin: a certain form of freedom. The survival instinct as the only baggage, she sails from one Paris to another to the rhythm of her romantic encounters.

While holidaying in the French Alps, a Swedish family deals with acts of cowardliness as an avalanche breaks out.

A well-known Neapolitan writer returns to his hometown after a long absence and encounters an old friend known as Caracas. Caracas, once a neo-fascist skinhead, is now converting to Islam.

Frustrated by the lack of intimacy in her relationship, a young schoolteacher goes through a series of intimidating and often violent sexual partners.

Along with her husband and three children, Marthe lives in an eden of her own creation, nearly isolated from the rest of the world. The arrival of a construction vehicle, however, pierces their tranquil, hermetic existence—before long a disused highway has been re-opened, and the family finds their home situated in the midst of rush-hour traffic. While the privileges of clean air, quietude and privacy are thus denied them, Marthe remains determined to stay no matter the cost.

In southern France, a Franco-Arabic shipyard worker along with his partner's daughter pursues his dream of opening a restaurant.

The protagonist is Carmen X, a sexy female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen's escape with the guard, her uncle's attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.

As she does every morning, Lucie takes advantage of her journey to work to lose herself for a while in the pages of a good book. And as she does every morning, she joins her colleagues at the office with a smile. It's a working day just like any other. Then suddenly all activity in the office stops. All attention is turned towards the window of the opposite building opposite and abanner reading: Man Alone. Is it a hoax? A cry for help? Everyone has his own interpretation, and will try, by any means possible, to discover what lies behind this mysterious message.

Two young men seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.

Michele, Goffredo, Mirko and Vito are four friends who have participated in the battles of the student in Sixties. Now in the Seventies, the four friends don't know what to do, though young and with so many possibilities to find a job in life. Intellectuals marginalized and misunderstood, the four friends find themselves when they can in a restaurant to discuss their outlandish theories. A girl named Olga disrupts their life, but Michele is her favorite, although he does not know what to do with the girl.

Valentin D is a hot designer architect who claims to be an orphan because he is too ashamed to admit he is the son of working-class scrap metal merchants from the north of France.

Because he forgot his identity card, Elias cannot take the entrance exam to Sciences Po. In search of a job while waiting to be able to take the exam again, he becomes an educator in a children's home. Confronted with an environment he doesn't know how to work, Elias doesn't yet know how much this experience will change his life.

Greek Sea, World War II. An Italian ship leaves a handful of soldiers in a little island; their mission is to spot enemy ships and to hold the island in case of attack. The village of the island seems abandoned and there isn't a single enemy in sight, so the soldiers begin to relax a little. Things change when their ship is hit and destroyed by the enemy, and the soldiers find themselves abandoned there.

A journalist tries to balance the duties of marriage and motherhood while researching a piece on college women who work as prostitutes to pay their tuition.

Pauline, a devoted and generous home help nurse, raises her two children alone, while also looking after her father, a former steelworker. Taking advantage of her popularity, the directors of an extremist political party suggest she become their candidate at the mayoral elections.

Eight Italian politicians from the communist party gather on a terrace in Rome for a get-together. They discuss about their past, present and future.

In paradise, a group gathers to discuss why people still act selfishly, even though Jesus sacrificed himself for them 2,000 years ago. As a result, a new Messiah is sent to Earth to address the issue.

Three stories about persons forced to think about the ethics and moral issues raised by medical advances.

A group of friends gathers for a birthday by the sea, only to face the looming possibility of the world ending within hours, transforming one fleeting, endless night into a life-altering experience.

An explosion sends fear and terror through Berlin. Young Maxi's home is reduced to rubble and ashes, burying her mother and little brothers. Only she and her father survive the terrorist bomb attack. When she happens to meet the charismatic Karl, who tells her about a conference for young people in Prague, she seizes the opportunity to flee Berlin and her grieving father. The political movement behind the meeting claims to be working for a better Europe. Maxi has no idea how close the murderers really are to her family.

It's mid 19th century, north of France. The story of a coal miner's town. They are exploited by the mine's owner. One day the decide to go on strike, and then the authorities repress them.

An all-knowing interlocutor guides us through a series of affairs in Vienna, 1900. A soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening. Later he has an affair with a young lady, who becomes a maid and does similarly with the young man of the house. The young man seduces a married woman. On and on, spinning on the gay carousel of life.

A young husband and father, perfectly content with his life, falls in love with another woman.

A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.

A woman with a metal plate in her head from a childhood car accident embarks on a bizarre journey, bringing her into contact with a firefighter who's reunited with his missing son after 10 years.

In a port city, the lives of a few isolated people, used to violence, are strongly influenced by the love they feel for each other. Choices, envy, love and tenderness are the driving forces that help these characters to be themselves and give meaning to their lives. A tribute to poetry, theatre and art.

Three war-torn strangers posing as a family flee Sri Lanka’s civil war to start over in a troubled Paris suburb, but their past traumas resurface as they struggle to survive in their new environment.

In one of the poorest areas of Paris, a school counselor devotes herself to working with disadvantaged students, while facing challenges of her own.

Charles drifts through politics, religion and psychoanalysis, rejecting them all. Once he realises the depth of his disgust with the moral and physical decline of the society he lives in, he decides that suicide is the only option...

Four guys from a Paris housing project fabricate a documentary about drug dealers working in the City of Lights. When a television network falls hook, line, and sinker for the prank video, the foursome are given a free three-week vacation in the upscale resort community of Biarritz. As they interact with both locals and fellow tourists, they learn about love, friendship, racism, and the differences between the rich and the poor.

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.

A group of Serbian socialists prepares for the war in a surreal underground filled by parties, tragedies, love and hate.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

In a social context deteriorated by a countrywide economic crisis, the life of several people will be turned upside down after they meet Cécile, a character who symbolizes desire.

A man meets up with two "good guys" to recover what is unlawfully his, taking them on his whirlwind ride, doing things they never would have imagined, just to survive.

Mona Bergeron is dead, her frozen body found in a ditch in the French countryside. From this, the film flashes back to the weeks leading up to her death. Through these flashbacks, Mona gradually declines as she travels from place to place, taking odd jobs and staying with whomever will offer her a place to sleep. Mona is fiercely independent, craving freedom over comfort, but it is this desire to be free that will eventually lead to her demise.

35-year-old Jean still lives with his mother in a small village in Corsica and works as a cook in the family's restaurant. His future, to his great despair, is all mapped out: he'll take over the restaurant. But one day Nora, a young and forceful woman, is thrown into the sea from a racing yacht. She washes up on the beach at Jean's feet - adventure has at last knocked at his door.

Sailors want to remain in their small world, which is warm and cozy and full of lies, but their routine life turns upside down when one of them gets mugged and badly beaten.

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

In the middle of the Aegean Sea, six men on a fishing trip on a luxury yacht decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared. Things will be measured. Songs will be butchered, and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals and rivals will become hungry. But at the end of the journey, when the game is over, the man who wins will be the best man. And he will wear on his smallest finger the victory ring: the Chevalier.

In Paris, Clara, psycho motor therapist, and Ismaël, music teacher, have been lovers for four years. Happy, the couple are expecting their first child and decide to move in together. But the news is not well received by their respective families because Clara is Jewish and Ishmael a Muslim. Although not practicing, this difference will gradually sow trouble in their love life.

Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.

A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious man called Duchemin. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations.

In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.

Jeannette is a single mother living in a working-class community in Marseilles; she tries to support herself and her two kids on her salary as a check-out girl at a supermarket and lives in an apartment complex where everyone is thrown into close proximity with everyone else. Marius is working as a security guard at a cement factory that has gone out of business; he's also squatting in the building, since the plant is soon to be demolished and he'll be needing his money later on. One day, Jeannette happens by the factory, and spotting several cans of paint, tries to take two of them home with her. Marius spots her and tries to chase her away, while she rails at him with curses against the capitalist system. The next day, an apologetic Marius appears at her doorstep, cans of paint in hand; the two soon become friendly, and a romance begins to bloom, though it quickly becomes obvious that Jeannette's romance novel fantasies are a bit off the mark from what Marius has in mind.

In a desperate attempt to reach Europe and crouched before an airstrip in Cameroon, a six-year-old boy and his older sister wait to sneak into the holds of an airplane. Not too far away, an environmental activist contemplates the terrible image of an elephant, dead and fangless. Not only do you have to fight against poaching, but you will also have to meet the problems of your newly arrived daughter from Spain. Thousands of kilometers to the north, in Melilla, a group of civil guards prepare to face the furious crowd of sub-Saharan people who have begun the assault on the fence. Three stories linked by a central theme, in which none of its protagonists know that their destinies are doomed to cross and that their lives will no longer be the same.

