Great Restorations

Bashu, the Little Stranger

Home Programme Great Restorations Bashu, the Little Stranger

Credits

Original title :
Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak
Country :
Iran
Year :
1989
Director :
Bahram Beyzaie
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
120 minutes
Format :
digital 
Actors :
Adnan Afravian, Susan Taslimi, Parviz Poorhosseini, Akbar Doodkar
Awards :
Best Restored Film, Venice Film Festival (Venezia Classici) 2025
🗣️ 18:15 : Introduction to the film (in English) | 18:30 : Start of the film

synopsis

After his family is killed in a bombing, young Bashu flees southern Iran alone and arrives in a remote northern village. Unable to speak the local language and shunned as a little stranger, he is taken in by a mother of two whose husband is away. A fragile bond slowly begins to grow between them.

 

 

Visuel : Bashu, the Little Stranger

A vital cinematic masterpiece. A reminder that art at any time, in any place, awakens human consciousness and shows us humane paths through friendship, coexistence, and peace.

Jafar Panahi

Four decades later, one can see more clearly than ever how Beyzaie transforms the cinema screen into a window carved from the history and literature of Iran, opening it onto a beautiful and spectacular world.

Mohammad Rasoulof

A pure joy in which there are absolutely no false moves.

Los Angeles Times

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Marcel Pagnol

César

Home Programme Marcel Pagnol César

Credits

Country :
France
Year :
1936
Director :
 Marcel Pagnol
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
141 minutes
Format :
digital | Nouvelle restauration 4K
Actors :
Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Charpin

synopsis

Panisse married Fanny, who had been abandoned by Marius, and adopted Césariot, the child of their love. He dies with everyone’s regrets. Fanny reveals the truth to her son, who receives his mother’s moving confession with deep concern. He decides to set out in search of his father.

Visuel : César

Le dernier volet de la Trilogie marseillaise comporte quelques-uns des plus beaux dialogues du cinéma français et confirme la singularité de la démarche cinématographique de Marcel Pagnol, réalisateur majeur.

àVoir-àLire.com

Le film garde la qualité de cette saga tribale ou se mêlent, s’aiment et surtout s’apostrophent des personnages qui sont à la fois les membres d’un pittoresque folklore régionaliste, et des types humains de valeur universelle.. César conclut dignement le plus grand feuilleton populaire que le cinéma parlant ait apporté a cette époque.

L’Âge classique du cinéma français, Éd.Flammarion

Pagnol’s directed chapter happens to be one of the more visually innovative, utilizing swipe transitions and offering a bit more jaunty energy thanks to shifting locales. Despite its simplicity, Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy is a richly textured, character-driven triptych of films detailing a certain time, place, and sentiment.

Ion Cinema

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Kaouther Ben Hania

The Man Who Sold His Skin

Home Programme Kaouther Ben Hania The Man Who Sold His Skin

Credits

Original title :
Ar-rajul alladi ba’a zahrahu
Country :
Tunisie-France
Year :
2020
Director :
Kaouther Ben Hania
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
104 minutes
Format :
digital 
Actors :
Yahya Mahayni, Dea Liane, Koen De Bouw, Monica Bellucci, Saad Lostan, Darina Al Joundi
Awards :
Best International Feature nominee, Oscars 2021
Age classification :
12+

synopsis

Sam Ali, a sensitive and impulsive Syrian, left his country to escape the war. To be able to travel to Europe and live with the love of his life, he accepts to have his back tattooed by a controversial contemporary artist. Turning his own body into a prestigious piece of art, Sam will come to realize that his decision might actually mean anything but freedom…

Visuel : The Man Who Sold His Skin

It weaves together satire and humane political awareness to create an original fable about art, privilege, freedom and identity.

NPR

A real original, made by adventurous artists in a small North African industry that’s never attracted much serious attention. But Ben Hania and her team have really come up with something fresh and dynamic here.

Deadline Hollywood

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Ciné-Théâtre

Variety Lights

Home Programme Ciné-Théâtre Variety Lights

Credits

Original title :
Luci del varietà
Country :
Italie
Year :
1950
Director :
Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
100 minutes
Format :
digital | New Restoration by Cineteca di Bologna
Actors :
Peppino De Filippo, Carla Del Poggio, Giulietta Masina, John Kitzmiller, Folco Lulli

synopsis

In a small town, Checco, the manager of a struggling theatre troupe, encounters the starry-eyed Lily. She quickly sells out crowds and earns the resentment of Checco’s mistress. But the fledgling performer has far bigger ambitions…

Visuel : Luci del Verità

Like a preliminary sketch for a vast and splendid mural, it unfolds Fellini’s wonderful vision of life in all its joy and sadness, hope and fear, triumph and defeat, that emerges fully in the later movies.

Los Angeles Times

With its tale of a peripatetic band of low-rent theatre types, Variety Lights incorporates many, if not most, of Fellini’s signature themes.

Slant Magazine

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Milos Forman

The Firemen’s Ball

Home Programme Milos Forman The Firemen’s Ball

Credits

Original title :
Horí, má panenko 
Country :
Tchécoslovaquie
Year :
1967
Director :
Milos Forman
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
73 minutes
Format :
Digital | Digital Restoration
Actors :
Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebánek, Josef Valnoha
Awards :
Nomination Best Foreign Language Film, Oscars 1969 

synopsis

The firemen of a provincial Czechoslovakian town throw a ball in honour of the chief’s retirement. There will be music and dancing, a beauty pageant and a raffle. However, the proceedings are dogged by difficulty at every step…

Visuel : The firemen's ball

The movie is just plain funny. And as a parable it is timeless, with relevance at many times in many lands. Remarkable, how often when I learn of a bureaucratic brainstorm, I think of the fireman moving the farmer’s chair closer to the flames.

Roger Ebert

Quietly, irresistibly funny in the early Forman manner (this was his first film in colour).

Time Out Film Guide

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Kaouther Ben Hania

Four Daughters

Home Programme Kaouther Ben Hania Four Daughters

Credits

Original title :
Banat Olfa
Country :
Tunisie-France
Year :
2023
Director :
Kaouther Ben Hania
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
107 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Olfa Hamrouni, Hend Sabri, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui, Ichraq Matar
Awards :
Best Documentary nominee, Oscars 2024 ; Meilleur documentaire, Festival de Cannes 2023
Age classification :
12+

synopsis

Olfa is the mother of four daughters in Tunisia. Her two older daughters, after becoming radicalised, leave the family to join Daesh fighters in Libya. The film features Olfa and her two remaining daughters, who retell their own story along actors standing in for the sisters and the various men in their lives.

Four Daughters

A compelling portrait of five women and a unique and ambitious work of nonfiction cinema that explores the nature of memory, the weight of inherited trauma, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.

Rotten Tomatoes

The poignancy of the movie’s formal conceit is that, by stepping into their roles, Matar and Karoui embody both a consoling presence and a devastating absence. Watching the two actors grow in confidence, laughing and joking alongside their on-screen mother and sisters, you could almost believe that you were watching a happily reunited family. But the illusion continually breaks. Indeed, this is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance.

Los Angeles Times

We see the power in tying together the fake and the real — the moment when method acting turns into method remembering.

Washington Post

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Cinematic Siblings

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Home Programme Cinematic Siblings Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Credits

Original title :
Bu San
Country :
Taïwan
Year :
2003
Director :
Tsai Ming-liang
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
82 minutes
Format :
digital | Restored by Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique
Actors :
Lee Kangsheng, Chen Siang-chyi, Kyonobu Mitamura

synopsis

The final screening of a closing movie palace in Taipei is King Hu’s classic, Dragon Inn. As the old wuxia film plays, scattered patrons wander the decaying cinema, their silent presences evoking longing, memory, and missed connections.

 

 

 

 

This is a funny, sad, stunningly smart movie about the end of movies, made in Tsai’s inimitable, unblinking style. No movie lover should miss it.

Christian Science Monitor

Discarding plot in favouring a procession of finely evoked resonances with histories political, aesthetic, and personal, all flowing through a shared experience of a memorialized work of art, Goodbye, Dragon Inn makes much of seemingly little by attuning itself to loss.

Metro Times

Goodbye Dragon Inn

Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there’s a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.

Salon

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Marcel Pagnol

Fanny

Home Programme Marcel Pagnol Fanny

Credits

Country :
France 
Year :
1932
Director :
Marc Allégret
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
127 minutes
Format :
digital | New 4K Restoration
Actors :
Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, Charpin

synopsis

Marius has left for “Malaysia,” abandoning his father, the old César, and Fanny, his fiancée who is carrying his child. A kind-hearted man, Panisse, marries her and adopts little Césariot, whom he loves as if he were his own son. But one day, Marius returns…

Le second volet de la Trilogie marseillaise est sans doute le meilleur. Le pittoresque s’efface un peu face au mélodrame assumé et Pagnol utilise avec brio les possibilités du cinéma parlant, accordant une place prépondérante au dialogue.

àVoir-àLire.com

Fanny

Deuxième volet de la trilogie marseillaise de Marcel Pagnol, Fanny en est l’épisode le plus mélo. Sacrifiée a l’ardeur voyageuse de son amant, l’innocente ‘séduite’ et résignée se donne à un homme mur. Sur ce canevas larmoyant, Pagnol brode finement son propos, drôle et touchant.

Télérama

Pagnol gives the illusion of naturalism through the vivid energy and affection of his characters.

Village Voice

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Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Luxembourg

Glimmers

Home Programme Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Luxembourg Glimmers

Credits

Original title :
Los destellos 
Country :
Espagne
Year :
2024
Director :
Pilar Palomero
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
101 minutes
Format :
digital
Actors :
Patricia López Arnaiz, Antonio De La Torre, Marina Guerola, Julián López
Awards :
4 nominations including Best Lead Actress (López Arnaiz) and Best Adapted Screenplay, Goya Awards 2025 ; Competition, San Sebastián International Film Festival 2024
In collaboration with Cercle culturel Espagnol Antonio Machado de Luxembourg

synopsis

Isabel’s life takes an unexpected turn when her daughter Madalen asks her to visit her ex-husband Ramón, from whom she has been separated for 15 years and who is relatively ill—and the resentment she feels towards him awakens. The former couple gradually engages in a reinvented relationship.


ℹ️Information : 

Due to a technical issue that occurred on January 24 during the screening of Glimmers, the film will be screened again on Wednesday, February 4 at 19:30 at Cercle Cité – Auditorium (2nd floor).

People who attended the screening on January 24 may contact us by email to reserve their seats for this new screening.

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Cinematic Siblings

Dragon Inn

Home Programme Cinematic Siblings Dragon Inn

Credits

Original title :
Long Men Ke Zhan
Country :
Taïwan
Year :
1967
Director :
King Hu
Version :
vostEN
Duration :
111 minutes
Format :
digital | New Restoration
Actors :
Polly Ling-Feng Shang-Kuan, Chun Shih, Ying Bai

synopsis

In 1457, a group of wandering swordsmen converge at the Dragon Gate Inn near the northern Chinese border, where the imperial secret police lie in wait. A fierce battle of strategy and swordplay ensues, turning the inn into a battleground for justice and survival.

Dragon Inn

Dragon Inn is to the martial arts genre what Stagecoach is to the Western. Hu evokes an entire world in his awe-inspiring wide-angle camerawork and graceful, still-unpredictable action scenes.

RogerEbert.com

Like most action filmmakers, Hu gets little credit for his direction of actors. But in each of his films he finds in his cast’s idiosyncratic expressions, their artful containment and deployment of energy, a beautiful counterpoint to his own stylistic flourishes – a mortal dimension to ground his metaphysical flights.

Criterion Collection

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