Vengeance au féminin

Lady Yakuza – Red Peony Gambler

Home Programme Vengeance au féminin Lady Yakuza – Red Peony Gambler

Credits

Original title :
Hibotan Bakuto
Country :
Japon
Year :
1968
Director :
Kosaku Yamashita
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
98 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Junko Fuji, Ken Takakura, Tomisaburo Wakayama

synopsis

When the head of the Yano yakuza family is assassinated, his daughter Oryu dissolves the clan and embarks on a journey to find her father’s killer.

Fuji would go on to play the Red Peony five more times, cementing the character as the archetype for many of the vengeful women to follow in Japanese cinema and beyond.

Eureka

What makes Yamashita’s Red Peony Gambler a classic ninkyo narrative and a must-see for any cinephile is nothing other than Junko Fuji’s performance.

Psychocinematography.com

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Great Restorations

Él

Home Programme Great Restorations Él

Credits

Country :
Mexique
Year :
1953
Director :
Luis Buñuel
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
92 minutes
Format :
digital | 4K Restoration
Actors :
Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Aurora Walker
📖 Based on the novel by Mercedes Pinto 
🗣️ 18:15 Introduction to the film (in English) | 18:30 Start of the film

synopsis

A husband’s suave exterior unravels after his marriage, and he unleashes his paranoid and volatile temper on his wife, which escalates to ever more dangerous and unpredictable tantrums.

Released at the height of his prolific Mexican period, Él remains one of Luis Buñuel’s crowning achievements.

Slant Magazine

El

With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.

The New Yorker

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Vengeance au féminin

La Mariée était en noir

Home Programme Vengeance au féminin La Mariée était en noir

Credits

Country :
France
Year :
1968
Director :
François Truffaut
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
107 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Michael Lonsdale

synopsis

Widowed on the very day of her wedding, Julie methodically eliminates one by one the five men she believes are responsible for her husband’s death. Whether they live in a luxury seaside apartment, a mountain hotel room, or a prison cell, she eventually tracks them down…

 

 

C’est l’apogée de la tentation hitchcockienne de Truffaut. Le film baigne dans un hiératisme irréel, une recherche formelle assez gauche et inhabituelle pour le cinéaste, et l’actrice est presque trop charnelle pour le rôle. Mais c’est justement ce qui rend le film si beau et si poignant, cette volonté désespérée d’y croire, de ressembler au modèle inaccessible. Le syndrome Vertigo.

Les Inrockuptibles

La Mariée était en noire

A revenge thriller that is said to have paved the way for Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

The Guardian

With its summery, Mediterranean surface, Jeanne Moreau as the ultimate femme fatale heroine and a knife-twisting tale of murderous revenge and unexpected romance, The Bride Wore Black is well worth rediscovering.

Salon.com

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Afternoon Adventures

Grave of the Fireflies

Home Programme Afternoon Adventures Grave of the Fireflies

Credits

Original title :
Hotaru no haka 
Country :
Japon
Year :
1988
Director :
Isao Takahata
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
99 minutes
Format :
digital 
Age classification :
12+ | Recommended for ages 14 and up
📖 Based on the short story by Akiyuki Nosaka

synopsis

The story of Seita and Setsuko, two young Japanese siblings, living in the declining days of World War II. When an American firebombing separates the two children from their parents, the two siblings must rely completely on one another while they struggle to fight for their survival.

 

 

Grave of the Fireflies

The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of The 400 Blows, Kes, and Vagabond, one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.

The New York Times

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

The Guardian

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Great Restorations

Blind Chance

Home Programme Great Restorations Blind Chance

Credits

Original title :
Przypadek
Country :
Pologne
Year :
1987
Director :
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
124 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Adam Ferency 
Awards :
Festival de Cannes, 1987
🗣️ 18:15 Introduction to the film (in English) | 18:30 Start of the film

synopsis

In Communist Poland, Witek, a medical student, runs to catch a train to Warsaw. From this single moment, three distinct versions of his future unfold, each shaped by whether he manages to board the train or whether he misses it.

Asks to be read for both its political and its philosophical implications. Kieślowski appears to propose that even in the divisive, paranoid atmosphere of late Communist Poland, a retreat from politics is not the answer. The echo chamber of unhappy endings amounts to a howl of no-win pessimism. But Kieślowski was a pessimistic humanist; his despair over humanity coexisted with a stubborn faith in it.

Criterion Collection

The indelible fulcrum of Kieslowski’s career as a documentarian and his blossoming as a major arthouse auteur.

Slant Magazine

Blind Chance

One of Krzysztof’s best films, perhaps even the best and the most original.

Agnieszka Holland

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Marcel Pagnol

Marius

Home Programme Marcel Pagnol Marius

Credits

Country :
France
Year :
1931
Director :
Alexander Korda
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
127 minutes
Format :
digital | New 4K Restoration
Actors :
Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Charpin
📖 Based on the play by Marcel Pagnol 

synopsis

Marseille, the Bar de la Marine. Marius is a young man exhilarated by the sea. He loves his father César, gruff but good-natured, and he also loves little Fanny, who sells seashells in front of his father’s bar. Since childhood, he has been burned by a desire to travel the world. He struggles against his restlessness. He does not want to abandon old César, who might die of grief, nor Fanny, who loves him desperately. And yet, the sea calls to him.

Marius

Il s’agit d’un ‘drame gai’. Le fond de l’histoire est mélodramatique mais les personnages sont si truculents, les comparses si pittoresques, les reparties si drôles, l’interprétation si brillante que l’on oublie l’anecdote au profit du détail. Le film n’a pas vieilli et a fait les délices de toutes les générations qui se sont succédé depuis 1931.

Dictionnaire des films. Éd. Larousse

One of the first great French talkies.

The Retro Set

Marius

Demazis, who had been working with Pagnol in the theater since 1927 (and would give birth to his child in 1933), is extraordinary in all three movies, playing the central female character in a story governed by the desires of men.

Chicago Reader

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Holocaust Remembrance Day

Austerlitz

Home Programme Holocaust Remembrance Day Austerlitz

Credits

Country :
Germany
Year :
2016
Director :
Sergei Loznitsa
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
94 minutes
Format :
digital
Awards :
Nomination Best European Documentary, European Film Awards 2017
In partnership with Zentrum fir politesch Bildung, Luxembourg City Film Festival, Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse, Centre National de l’Audiovisuel, SCRIPT and IFEN
🗣️ Followed by a discussion with Gian Maria Tore (Assistant Professor in Film, Art, and Media, Uni.lu) and the audience | in French

synopsis

Placing his camera among visitors wandering through the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, Sergei Loznitsa invites us to reflect upon the dynamics between history, memory and tourism. 

Austerlitz

Loznitsa shows you the central activity: looking. Everyone is looking, looking, looking. Looking at what? Buildings, walls, yards, enclosures. The victims are not there. The war criminals are not there. The past is not there. Perhaps each new tourist erodes the site further until all that is left is dust. But visiting these sites is not meaningless and not wrong. It is part of human curiosity, which is better than indifference or forgetting.

The Guardian

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Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Luxembourg

To Steal from a Thief

Home Programme Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Luxembourg To Steal from a Thief

Credits

Original title :
Cien anos de perdón
Country :
Espagne-Argentine
Year :
2016
Director :
Daniel Calparsoro
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
89 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Luis Tosar, Rodrigo De La Serna, Raúl Arévalo
Awards :
2 nominations, Goya Awards 2017
In collaboration with the Cercle culturel Espagnol Antonio Machado de Luxembourg

synopsis

Thieves rob a bank and make off with several safety deposit boxes, one of which is reputed to contain some politically damaging information.

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Kaouther Ben Hania

The Voice of Hind Rajab

Home Programme Kaouther Ben Hania The Voice of Hind Rajab

Credits

Original title :
Sawt Hind Rajab
Country :
Tunisie-France
Year :
2025
Director :
Kaouther Ben Hania
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
89 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel Silver Lion 
Awards :
Grand Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival 2025

synopsis

Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. Hind, a 6-year-old girl, is trapped in a car under IDF fire in Gaza, pleading for help (Hind’s actual voice, preserved as a rescue-call recording, is heard though the volunteers are played by actors). While trying to keep her on the line, the Red Crescent workers do everything they can to get an ambulance to her.

No other film this year will get more people talking, or more people crying.

BBC.com

Proves quite unavoidably devastating: The original audio footage carries a brutal emotional wallop in any context, and there’s value in making a cinema audience captive to it, unable to pause or stop or avert our ears.

Variety

Hania has form in metafiction, however this is a step up even from the queasily gripping Four Daughters. The gravity of the subject has sharpened her storytelling instincts.

Indiewire

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Vengeance au féminin

Revenge

Home Programme Vengeance au féminin Revenge

Credits

Country :
France
Year :
2017
Director :
Coralie Fargeat
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
108 minutes
Format :
digital 
Actors :
Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens
Awards :
Toronto Film Festival 2017

synopsis

Three wealthy businessmen, all married and good fathers, gather in a desert area for their annual hunting trip. But this time, one of them has brought along his young mistress, a seductive nymphet who quickly sparks the desire of the other two.

Visuel : Revenge

Radical et gore, ce récit est surtout la révélation d’une réalisatrice à suivre, Coralie Fargeat, qui dénonce sans complaisance les violences faites aux femmes.

Le Journal du dimanche

Un ‘rape and revenge’ sanglant et surréaliste, kaléidoscope de visions gore, avec une nouvelle icône : Matilda Lutz.

Première

Fargeat’s blood-drenched feature debut, Revenge, tapped into the fury of the #MeToo movement and set the tone for the precarious balance between feminism and exploitation that characterises her latest picture, The Substance.

The Guardian

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