Official Competition :

Caterpillar by Koji Wakamatsu
En Familie by Pernille Fischer Christensen
En ganske snill mann by Hans Petter Moland
If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle by Florin Serban
Greenberg by Noah Baumbach
Howl by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Jud Suesse by Oskar Roehler
How I Ended This Summer by Alexei Popogrebsky
Mammuth by Benoit Delepine, Gustave de Kervern
Please Give by Nicole Holofcener
Puzzle by Natalia Smirnoff
A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop by Zhang Yimou
Shahada by Burhan Qurbani
Submarino by Thomas Vinterberg
The Kids are All Right by Lisa Cholodenko
The Killer Inside Me by Michael Winterbottom
Tuan Yuan by Wang Quan’an
Bal by Semih Kaplanoglu
Der Räuber by Benjamin Heisenberg
Na Putu by Jasmila Žbanić
Sherkarchi by Rafi Pitts
The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski

2010! Dissidenz is back from its maternity leave (just in time for the Year of the Tiger)! The end of the year was the occasion to fill up the site with new DTR (Download-To-Rent) films (or films you can watch on video on demand) and we had to organize the life of all of them: fictions or documentaries, we couldn’t just make them available in the worldwide web vast ocean without guiding you to each one of them and highlight them all. From the iconoclastic Ten Easy Pieces to the frightening reality of The Camorra School by Nico Di Biase, through the hilarious Death’s Glamour by Luc Moullet or the exquisite Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert (which will be available on DVD on February 16), we are happy to introduce little gems of a different cinema to be discovered since December 23.
If you’re a French speaker, do not hesitate to discover the series The Craft in the Shadow and Profession Producer by Emmanuel Chouraqui, which highlight less known cinema jobs but which are as important for the creation of films. Through interviews of professionals, discover the craft of a cinematographer, a sound engineer, a film distributor and many more. On the producer side, meet with established personalities in French cinema (Martine Marignac, Paulo Branco, Robert Guediguian…), who share their vision of their work. Captivating!

View the new releases available on video on demand

View the full list of films available on video on demand

Fontaine Le Glou

The Grissom Gang (1971) by Robert Aldrich

“It’s the story of a rich girl, who is kidnapped by small crooks, and the way she struggles with them, with her knowledge of the upper class, to try to get away from it, not being raped etc… It’s fantastic. At the end she almost falls in love with one of the kidnappers who has mercy on her. At the end he lets her out –the police discovered where they were– but he goes out first to prevent her from being shot and gets shot. The man falls and she runs to him, moved by him giving his life for her and because she has feelings, slave feelings in fact, for him. Because she runs to him, her father who is a pure WASP rejects her. It’s an incredible film.”

More information about The Grissom Gang

Synopsis: Miss Blandish (Kim Darby), a young well-to-do heiress suffering from the emotional strain of overprotective parents, is kidnapped by a group of money-hungry thugs and thrust into a world of slums and poverty. As the Grissom Gang holds her for ransom, Miss Blandish begins a torrid love affair with their murderous leader, Slim (Scott Wilson), throwing a wrench in the family’s plans to free her. Darby gives a complex and sultry performance as the pouty riches-to-rags debutante whose attraction to Slim seems driven by a spiky mixture of love, sex, and masochism.

An actress in Luc Moullet’s films A Girl is a Gun and Anatomy of a Relationship, Marie-Christine Questerbert also appeared in More by Pascal Bonitzer or Diary of a Seducer by Danièle Dubroux. She directed short films and a feature-length film in 2000, The Dark Room, which was presented at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival and which will be released on DVD with optional English subtitles on February 16, 2010.

Dissidenz presents rare fictions or documentaries available for the first time on video on demand (download-to-rent): discover unusual programs at a rate between 1.99 and 4.99 euros, and watch them as much as you want for 72 hours at home! A great idea in these cold times!…

THE CRAFT IN THE SHADOW: a series by Emmanuel Chouraqui featuring those from the crew we less hear about but without whom a film could not be made. For each craft, a professional tells us about his everyday work.

The Craft in the Shadow: Nicolas Becker – Sound Effects Engineer
The Craft in the Shadow: Michel Burstein – Press Agent
The Craft in the Shadow: Jean-François Camilleri – Film Distributor
The Craft in the Shadow: Patrick Cauderlier - Stuntman
The Craft in the Shadow: Duran Duboi – Special Effects
The Craft in the Shadow: Francis Lai - Composer
The Craft in the Shadow: Laurent Lafran – Sound Engineer
The Craft in the Shadow: Françoise Menidrey – Casting Director
The Craft in the Shadow: Philipe Murcier – Dubbing Actor
The Craft in the Shadow: Christine Parat – Artistic Agent
The Craft in the Shadow: Arnaud Potier - Cinematographer
The Craft in the Shadow: Jean de Trégomain – Production Manager
The Craft in the Shadow: Marie-Joseph Yoyotte - Editor

PROFESSION PRODUCER: a series by Emmanuel Chouraqui featuring producers -those who make the films exist. A tough job, not often rewarding, for passionate people only.

Profession Producer: Maurice Bernart
Profession Producer: Frédéric Bourboulon
Profession Producer: Paulo Branco
Profession Producer: Robert Guédiguian
Profession Producer: Didier Haudepin
Profession Producer: Francine Jean-Baptiste
Profession Producer: Martine Marignac
Profession Producer: Michel Propper

DOCUMENTARY GEMS AND RARITIES TO DISCOVER

Murder of a Hatmaker by Catherine Bernstein
Au premier faux pas by Patrick Benquet
Ceci est une pipe (This is a Blowjob) by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic
Investigation Into the Invisible World by Jean-Michel Roux
State of Weightlessness by Maciej Drygas
Grass by Mathieu Levain and Olivier Porte
History of a Secret by Mariana Otero
The Lullaby by Maciej Drygas
The Budding Fourth Estate by Jean-Pascal Boffo
The Good Pupil by Pascal Quaregna
Father Glasberg by Julie Bertuccelli
The Loan, the Chiken and the Egg by Claude Mouriéras
The Black Blood of Medea by Nico Di Biase
The Loneliman of the Château Du Fresne by Pierre Beuchot
The Camorra School by Nico Di Biase
The Absentees by Catherine Bernstein
The Spirits of Koniambo, in the Kanak land by Jean-Louis Comolli & Alban Bensa
The Sour Grapes by Catherine Bernstein
The Man from the Roubines by Gérard Courant
New York Year Zéro by Radovan Tadic
Oma by Catherine Bernstein
Because They Killed Ibrahim by Alain Dufau
Ten Easy Pieces by Radovan Tadic
Factory Dream by Luc Decaster
Schizophrenia by Vita Zelakeviciute
On the Tracks of the Fox by Stéphane Chopard
Living the Invisibles by Dirk Dumon
Yvette Good Lord ! by Sylvestre Chatenay

RARE FICTIONS, CURIOSITIES AND MUST HAVE

Céline by Jean-Claude Brisseau
This Filthy Earth by Andrew Kötting
Gallivant by Andrew Kötting
Home by Ursula Meier
In Absentia by Stephen & Timothy Quay
The Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert
Life As It Is by Jean-Claude Brisseau
Jan Svankmajer’s Cabinet by Stephen & Timothy Quay
Death’s Glamour by Luc Moullet
Lorna’s Silence de Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne
The Shipwrecked of the D17 by Luc Moullet
Workers for the Good Lord by Jean-Claude Brisseau
The Cremator by Juraj Herz
Mondo Mulloy by Phil Mulloy
Rembrandt Fecit by Jos Stelling
Singapore Sling by Nikos Nikolaidis
The Christies by Phil Mulloy
A Monkey on the Back by Jacques Maillot

Born from a family of artists -his father was a poet, an author amongst other things of the Soviet Union anthem- and brother of Andrei Konchalovsky (Siberiade, Runaway Train), Nikita Mikhalkov is one of the most important director of Russian post-second world war cinema history. A filmmaker and an actor, he starts in 1974 with Friend Among Strangers, Stranger Among Friends, a Siberian western with a virtuoso direction, before he directs Slave of Love, homage to the cinema pioneers and his first masterpiece. In 1977, Mikhlakov brilliantly adapts Anton Tchekov in Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano then Alexander Volodine in Five Evenings in 1979. Oblomov, directed in 1980, stages one of the most popular character in Russia, an emblem of laziness, created by Ivan Gontcharov. Family Relations in 1981, deals with humor of the westernization of Russia through the visit of a countryside old woman to her daughter living in the city, and it’s with Without Witness in 1983, that the first part of his career stops before the international consecration with Black Eyes in 1987.

Constantly flirting between drama and comedy, singing the eternal slave soul, Nikita Mikhalkov wrote some of the most beautiful pages in Russian modern cinema history. Exploring the human soul as much as the Russian identity, his cinema is one of an aesthete and a poet, as moving as astonishing. Available for the very first time in France on DVD, his first films are now gathered in box-sets that finally allow us to fully enjoy the work of this one of a kind artist. The DVDs also include interviews with the director, the writers and the composers and commentaries about the films by French film critic Pierre Murat.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Nikita Mikhalkov Set 1
More information about Nikita Mikhalkov Set 2

Duel in the Sun (1943) by King Vidor.
“I saw the film seven years ago but the shock I felt when I saw it is still as strong as it was. What happens with this trio goes above the classic love triangle. The film is awesome, with wonderful colors. The study of male identity taught many things to me as a woman and the identification to the heroin is very energizing. It’s violent but there is a powerful thing about revolt in which I recognized myself. I felt less lonely.”

Synopsis : Beautiful half-breed Pearl Chavez becomes the ward of her dead father’s first love and finds herself torn between her sons, one good and the other bad.

More information about Duel in the Sun

Actress Caroline Ducey played her first part in cinema when she was 17 in Too Much Happiness by Cedric Khan in 1994. She also played in Romance by Catherine Breillat, The Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert, Shimkent Hotel by Charles de Meaux, The Last Mistress with Catherine Breillat again and The Joy of Singing by Ilan Duran Cohen in 2008.

Invasión tells the story of a city, Aquilea, “which is besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a handful of men, who may not be heroes”, according to Jose Luis Borges’ words.
Shot in a wonderfully contrasted black and white, this eternal story of a town under siege becomes, through Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges’ writing work, a metaphysical and poetical tale. Focused on its complex storyline and on its characters, depicted with care, Invasión is and ode to all the forces of resistance -past and future. Directed in 1969, shown on the opening of the very first Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Films Festival, the film had a strange destiny. Banned in 1974 by Argentinian authorities, its negative was stolen and it was impossible to see the film for years before its restoration in 2000. A look back on a forgotten gem of South American cinema with director Hugo Santiago.
*** On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the making of Invasión, a trilingual (French, English, Spanish) DVD boxset including two discs and a 156-page booklet will be available on sale exclusively on Dissidenz and at Blaq Out la boutique (52 rue Charlot, 75003 Paris), starting from December 1, 2009. A special presentation with Hugo Santiago will also take place at la boutique on December 1 at 19:15. ***

What is the genesis of Invasión?
I was living in France and going back to Buenos Aires to make two short films. I had a simple idea, a town invaded and defended by a handful of people. I saw Bioy Casares and told him about it. He told me “you have to speak to Borges about it”. That very day we went to meet Borges at the National Library. I told him about my idea. I had been Borges’ student for a year and I had regularly met him before I went to France in 1959. Borges and Bioy were movies buffs, Borges wrote some film reviews when he was younger. They had both a bad experience with cinema as they wrote two screenplays, which never came to life. They wrote a twenty-page text: there were some of the characters, a few scenes, some from their memories, but not enough of the continuity they were beautifully implementing in their novels. My idea to work with them was that the film was part of a universe they were the masters of. I would have made the film their way so why not making it with originals? Borges loved it and laughed a lot. They asked me to critize their work. I couldn’t do it in front of Borges so I did it with Bioy. He told me he was going to leave for Europe for a few months and that Borges was waiting to hear from me. The day Bioy left I met with Borges and for hours -with an unexpected courage– I analyzed and criticized their work. When I stopped talking, Borges said “we’re starting tomorrow”. We started the next day and we wrote for a year. We worked scene after scene. A structure emerged and we carefully sticked to it. The things we needed for our structure were coming one after the other, even the characters.

How was it to work with Borges?
It was wonderful. Borges was our master and we had a great admiration for him. He was very curious. He always took care of keeping our work together balanced. Every one of his suggestions had to be discussed and criticized, often with humor -he was a great humorist. I never worked as easily as with Borges. There was absolutely no room for ego. I didn’t need it, not any more. He had already been, when younger, very proud, adamant, there was no room for pride anymore, except for the work coming. We were working on things over and over.

What was your purpose through that story?
There was no purpose. Some events, in South America and other places, have seem to suggest answers but as we were making it our only care was about characters and storytelling. Maybe you could say there was something in the air we could have felt, but you could especially say that now, forty years later. For example, we had to choose a place where the hero would be put in jail and beaten. We chose a stadium because it could be like an antique theater. Later, people where tortured and put in jail in stadiums in Chile. The events occurred afterwards. When the film was finished –in 1969, a few days before the Cannes Film Festival where it opened the very first Directors’ Fortnight– when I was asked about the meaning of the film I answered that I was dealing with themes, like in music. And the main theme was invasion, in all its aspects. A few events and characters were inspired by Borges’ memories -the character of Don Porfirio was inspired by Borges- master, Macedonio. But we were guided by the storyline. When we established the structure, Borges asked me “where do we start from ?”. I answered, “we start with the beginning”. I was so afraid our collaboration might stop anytime that I asked him to write the last scene right after the first one. I was saying to myself: if he wants to stop working with me, I would have these two sentences to get the tone of the film. Then we wrote the dialogues. The dialogues in Argentinean are not realistic. It’s a language nobody ever spoke, a kind of 30s-40s Argentinean but very stylish. A really peculiar language.

How was the shooting and where does the black and white contrast come from?
The shooting went very well. We had an old Arriflex camera from pre-war time but it had a great short lens and we had an excellent operator. We worked a lot, we had time. There were no spectacular things that would have required a lot of money and I had what I needed. We had already made two short films with Ricardo Aronovich, the cinematographer -the second one was more contrasted than the first one. To make Invasión we experimented things. We looked for those intense greys, our reference was Rembrandt’s sketches. We had the chance to work with a laboratory where we could experiment what we wanted. The baths, the times, we worked a lot with an ultra-sensitive film we brought from Rochester, from Kodak. When the film was done and the people of Kodak saw the film, they sent us a congratulation letter asking “how did you do that ?”. This had been the work of a photographer in a lab, testing baths, trying again…

How was the film welcomed in Argentina and in the rest of the world?
In Argentina, the official film critic found it impossible to understand. They didn’t tell it too loud because it was Borges and Casares but they talked about a fantasy universe and things like that… When the TV channel that had put money in the film decided to broadcast it, they found out it had been banned. The army was almost controlling the country. The film was banned and reels were stolen from the laboratory. This film, which was acclaimed by the whole world critic, was, five years later, banned by military forces as a subversive film. They started to grasped things that weren’t there when we made it. Ten years after the release of the film, a French critic wrote a newspaper article in which he listed things he had seen during those years, like the stadiums used as prisons and many other things like that in Argentina, Chile or even Korea, and he said ”I saw all those things in 1969, in a film called Invasión”.

Had the film disappeared by that time?
Eight reels of the original negative were stolen, no new print could be made. Such was the situation until 2000, when, thanks to Pierre André Boutang and the people of Arte Channel, we could restore the film. I took the two reels left -forty minutes of the film-, I found two good prints and, with cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich, we worked to find again the density and the contrasts of the original reels.

By Olivier Gonord, Paris, November 4, 2009

The sacrifice (1986) by Andrei Tarkovski.
“Tarkovski is a miracle. Bergman told it before me, Tarkovksi made a thing like no one before him. There is a thing about the representation of fantasies, the representation of the imaginary and the representation of what is supposed to be real. All the levels are dealt with equally. Images, which would we be dealt with by everyone else as dreamlike elements, are dealt with as if they came from the reality of the action. Images you can not classify. Tarkovski erased the comforting frontiers of representation. It’s an idea of cinema I’m willing to fight for.”

Synopsis: On a small, remote island, where friends and family gather for drama critic Alexander’s (Erland Josephson) birthday celebration. The revelry is interrupted by a radio announcement: World War III has begun, and Mankind is only hours away from utter annihilation…

More information about The Sacrifice

Hugo Santiago was born in Buenos Aires, in 1939. He has lived in France since 1959. After studying literature, philosophy and music, he went on to work as assistant director (notably to Robert Bresson, from 1959 to 1966) and as a director of the theatre. Invasion was his first feature film, co-written with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges in 1969. His second feature film, The Others was presented at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Hugo Santiago has worked for cinema as well as television. He directed among other things an adaptation of Electre, The Life of Galileo and also many works about music.

Born the 6th of May 1902 in Sarrebrueck Germany, Max Ophuls grew up in a family of industrials. In 1920, he started a career on stage as an actor and a stage director before he ventured into cinema in 1930 with Anatol Litvak, as a dialoguist. Libelei, which he directed in 1933, made him famous in France where he moved to when Nazis took control over Germany. He directed several films in France (Werther in 1938, adapted from Goethe) and moved to the United States in 1940 and spent there years before starting to work again. He directed then, among other things, Letter From an Unknown Woman in 1948 and Caught in 1949. Back to France in 1950, he directed the four masterpieces gathered now in a wonderful 4-disc boxset: La Ronde (1950), Pleasure (1952), The Earrings of Madame De… (1953) and Lola Montes (1955).

Virtuoso long shots, sumptuous tracking, superb frame compositions, the direction by Ophuls is a pleasure for the senses. Although he used to say “I have no style“, Ophuls did obviously have one and it was stunningly beautiful and elegant. “A move in the tracking can express drama better than dialogues“, the filming serves the plot and follows the emotions of the characters. If the films of Max Ophuls are fascinating in the way they are made, they also are rich in their themes and pretty bold. Women have the central place, mostly fighting against their social fate and often going away from the stereotypes of the time. From Madame De to the prostitutes of Pleasure, the female characters of Ophuls are complex -a complexity inherited from the adapted novels but yet reinforced by the director’s work– whereas the men are often summed up to their social function. Women are a source of fascination and mystery, they are filmed with love. Amongst other notable things, we can point out the role of sexual pleasure, totally assumed, which caused the original X-rating of Pleasure in the United Kingdom. Behind the social masks, blood flows and passion overwhelms.

From his theatre background, Ophuls keeps a taste for the world of spectacle. The narrator of La Ronde links it to the stage and the brothels can be seen as theatres of artificial seductions. The high society of Madame De is also a stage of appearances. Ophuls also develops a form that will become highly fashionable in the 1960s in Europe, the sketches film.

These themes and tendencies are all in the accursed masterpiece of Ophuls, a scandal by the time of its release and a victim of rough editing by its producers, Lola Montes. The film depicts the life of a notorious courtesan, mistress of the King of Bavaria, who becomes, literaly, a circus attraction. Re-enacted on stage, her life -with flashbacks for the film viewer- becomes a spectacle of decadence. The talent of the director explodes in extraordinary colours and sounds with a stunning choreographic direction in Cinemascope. A tragic destiny magnified during the beautiful circus sequences, Lola Montes was the masterpiece of the director, who was deeply wounded by the film commercial failure. Back to Germany two years later just before his death, Ophuls went for a last run on stage -the starting and ending point of a unique body of work of a considerable importance, which influenced people like Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or Stanley Kubrick.

Francis Chérasse

More information about :
La Ronde
Pleasure
The Earrings of Madame De…
Lola Montes

Desperate (1947) by Anthony Mann.
“I like the film for its “business model” and for its clever disjoinment aspect. There are many things we don’t understand, which are not explained. It’s a testimony of the freedom of those times compared with the nowadays control. The attitude of the police, the human part of the bad guys, their complexity -which is the most difficult thing to achieve in that kind of films. The work on space is also great, as well as the wonderful last sequence.”

Synopsis: Steve Randall, a truck driver, is hired for a job. He doesn’t know he works for gangsters. He becomes the accomplice of a hold-up. As he is accused, he denounces the mobsters. He flees with the girl he just married while the gangsters chase him and want him dead.

More information about Desperate

Raul Ruiz, who has been living in France since 1973 -after the coup in Chile-, directed more than a hundred films. He built an impressive body of work, which received awards in many festivals around the world from Cannes, to Berlin, Locarno, Moscow or Rotterdam. He directed films such as Three Crowns of the Sailor, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Three Lives and Only One Death, Genealogies of a Crime, The Comedy of Innocence, Days in the Country and, more lately, Nucingen Haus starring Jean-Marc Barr, Elsa Zylberstein and Audrey Marnay.