France

Amazing, abstracted, razor-sharp homage to 70s Italian horror movies. “A delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire… An outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip.” — New Directors/New Films

More than 2,000 films from 45 countries covering every conceivable subject and every imaginable technique were previewed to select this programme of the year’s most imaginative and beautifully realised animated shorts.

“French New Wave alumnus Jacques Rivette offers a ramshackle road trip across France’s Languedoc region with an underperforming circus troupe in this effervescent miniature.” — Time Out. With Jane Birkin.

An action-packed sampler from Autour de Minuit, one of the most dynamic animation production houses in Europe whose eclectic stable of animators include the crew who put together this year’s Academy Award-winner, Logorama.

With wit, tenderness and a keen eye for the fledgling signs of intelligence and sociability, this beautifully shot documentary follows the first year in the lives of four infants from different parts of the world.

This mesmerising, densely beautiful film from Sri Lanka takes us on a mysteriously symbolic journey with a young man who plunges to earth. “Like a freshly remembered dream.” — San Francisco Bay Guardian

An extraordinary three-part epic of the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal. “Edgar Ramirez inhabits the title role with the arrogant charisma of Brando in his prime. It’s an astonishing film.” — indieWIRE

A rookie prison guard finds himself trapped on the wrong side of a riot in this powerhouse prison drama that cleaned up at the Spanish Academy Awards. “Satisfyingly intense and suitably incendiary.” — Variety

Best Actress Award Cannes 2010. “An intriguing, not-quite love story featuring French superstar Juliette Binoche, English opera singer William Shimell and the spectacular Tuscan countryside.” — Salon.com

A band of out-of-work Moscow musicians travels to Paris posing as the celebrated Bolshoi Orchestra in this lavish, shamelessly entertaining comedy-drama from the director of Live and Become. With Mélanie Laurent.

France's fearless Gaspar Noé (Irreversible) has created a vast, stupefying vision of life after death, a hallucinatory extravaganza. "An experience equally sublime and infuriating, revelatory and painful, ecstatic and terrifying." — Philadelphia Inquirer

This tense, atmospheric, true Cold War spy movie centres on a disillusioned KGB colonel who risked everything in the early 80s to let the West know just how thoroughly Soviet spies had infiltrated American security.

This moving family drama from a young woman writer/director takes shape around the absence of a charismatic, workaholic film producer husband and father. “Vividly authentic… an extraordinarily humanistic drama.” — LA Times

A quintessential French icon gets his big-screen bio. Sixties singer Serge Gainsbourg mixed pop outlawry with low-down lechery to blaze his own hipster manifesto, seducing Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin along the way.

Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan star in Roman Polanski’s sharp-witted adaptation of the Robert Harris bestseller. “A gripping conspiracy thriller and scabrous political satire… addictive and outrageous.” — The Guardian

This new animated classic from the director of The Triplets of Belleville, scripted by Jacques Tati, tells the sweet, funny tale of a magician travelling in Scotland and the impressionable young girl who adopts him as her dad.

This compelling, superbly acted psychological drama of a rebellious teenage boy’s obsessive pursuit of his birth mother is based on a true story. “A fascinating drama… tremendously effective.” — Screendaily

A portrait of one of the world’s great ballet companies by one of the world’s great documentarians. “Sumptuous in its length and graceful in its rhythm… this is one of the finest dance films ever made.” — NY Times

Widely dubbed the Das Boot of tank warfare, this visceral, indicting Israeli film was awarded the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival. “Powerful and original… An astonishing piece of cinema.” — NY Times

Lourdes takes viewers deep inside the famous religious shrine while providing a subtle drama about hope, faith and the random nature of miracles. “As magically, richly ambivalent as life itself.” — Financial Times

In this sweetly grotesque comedy from the directors of Louise-Michel, an elephantine Gérard Depardieu retires and takes to the road on his old motorbike. “Droll, often outrageous and completely fresh.” — Hollywood Reporter

Rare, colourful films from the earliest days of The Moving Picture are vividly reanimated in this entertaining Live Cinema show presented by The Film Archive with Free Theatre performers Chris Reddington and Dr Ryan Reynolds.

In this intense contemplation of the singer’s art, Pedro Costa films Jeanne Balibar painstakingly rehearsing and recording. “A startling and lucid lesson in filming musical performance and a cinephilic marvel.” — New Yorker

Astronomy, archaeology and history are mesmerisingly interwoven and juxtaposed in this visually breathtaking meditation on Chile’s far distant and more recent past by the remarkable documentarian Patricio Guzmán.

A miraculously photographed showcase of some of the sea’s least seen and most incredible specimens, this is an immersive cinema experience to be relished while you have the chance on the big screen.

A young French actress playing a nun has a profound encounter with a real Portuguese nun during the shooting in Lisbon. An eccentric study of religious doubt steeped in the beauty of Lisbon and the sadness of fado.

Jacques Audiard’s dense, involving, Oscar-nominated crimeworld drama is one of the year’s standout films. “Lean, dangerous, urgent… Instantly takes its place among the greats of the prison and crime genres.” — The Times

A father’s world collapses when he loses his job as a pool attendant to his son, while his central African country is torn apart by civil war. Winner Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are hipster geneticists and director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) ups the ante to create a hybrid horror that grafts the cine-DNA from Frankenstein, Rosemary’s Baby and The Fly.

At 101 Manoel de Oliveira, the world’s oldest filmmaker, mixes up antique formality and the high visual style of the pre-sound era to rich and strange effect in a surreal tale of perverse love.

A deadpan black comedy memoir of growing up Palestinian in Israel. “Suleiman is turning the political into something extremely hysterical.” — Time Out NY

This strikingly strange tale of a Lisbon drag queen’s late gender-identity crisis mixes realism, melodrama and delicate fantasy. “Pure enchantment… This is a beguiling, original and unclassifiable film.” — Sight & Sound

Based on a cult Belgian TV series that centres around three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse, this anarchic, crudely animated stop-motion flight of surreal lunacy is the nuttiest film in our programme.

French director Julie Bertuccelli brings a startled outsider eye to this poetic Australian/French movie about a young widow (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her little daughter’s solemn obsession with a giant tree.

François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard’s love for cinema brought them together; politics and aesthetics drove them apart. This expertly documented and riveting exploration of the New Wave is unmissable for anyone fascinated by film art.

This sensuous, sun-drenched fable tells of a macho small-town fisherman dividing his attention between his adoring wife and the handsome, bohemian outsider who becomes his lover. Audience Award Sundance 2010.

Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as a French coffee plantation owner refusing to budge from a West Africa riven with civil war in Claire Denis’ immersive new drama. “Gripped me from start to finish.” — Sight & Sound

In images of arresting purity and composure, expatriate Iranian photographer and video artist Shirin Neshat elaborates a haunting sense of women’s lives and options in Iran in 1953. Best Director, Venice Film Festival.