French Films with MUBI

A white woman returns to her childhood home in Cameroon after years of living in France. While there, she reflects upon her youth. When she was growing up there in the 1950s, her life was one of ignorance. She bonded with an African servant, unaware of the racial tensions stirring all around her.

Returning to the beaches that have been part of her life, Agnès Varda invents a kind of self-portrait-documentary. Agnès stages herself among excerpts of her films, images and reportages; weaving public and private struggles, loves and friendships, films and people, and the history of French cinema.

In a remote stretch of the French countryside, 4-year-old Nana lives with her mother. When Nana returns home one day to an empty house, her mother mysteriously absent, a journey into the night of her childhood begins.

In 1975 Delphine Seyrig recorded interviews with twenty-four actresses in France and the US, including Maria Schneider, Jane Fonda, and Shirley MacLaine, about their experience across the industry. Through their words, Seyrig reveals the frustrations of working within the patriarchal studio system.

Made during confinement, In My Room plunges us into the poignant story of a woman at the twilight of her life, through recordings of the director’s deceased grandmother. Living rooms become stages where life is performed. Windows become portals to the lives of others.

Based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, this classic of the French New Wave chronicles a buoyant love triangle between two friends, one French and one German, and an alluring woman, the object of their mutual obsession, over twenty-five years.

Post-World War III, Paris lies in ruins. A scientist researching time travel hopes to send subjects to various time periods, and finds a suitable subject in a prisoner with a vivid pre-war childhood memory. The prisoner travels in time, and comes to understand the incident he witnessed as a child.

Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece Pauline on a vacation to Normandy. There, the two navigate the men around them. Marion runs into her old flame Pierre and attempts to set him up with Pauline, while she starts a liaison with middle-aged Henri.

Paul is young, just demobbed from service in the French Army, and disillusioned with civilian life. While his girlfriend builds herself a career as a pop singer, Paul becomes more isolated from his peers—“the children of Marx and Coca Cola”, as the credits announce—and from their social politics.

Michel is released from jail after serving a sentence for thievery. His mother dies and he resorts to pickpocketing as a means of survival.