Laura Productions

A student demonstration in Paris leads to an unexpected reunion between two childhood friends.

While researching their subject’s life for their feature My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud, co-directors/writers Gerard Mordillat and Jerome Prieur made a documentary on the famed French actor/writer/poet that died in 1948 at the age of 51.

Jacques Lemonnier of IBM France, Francois Dalle of L'Oreal and other ultrapowerful French moguls are surprisingly candid -- and cold-blooded -- as they discuss their attitudes about business in this startling 1978 documentary. After sounding off about unions, strikes, hierarchy and management, the subjects realized how callous they sounded and managed to convince the French government to suppress the film.

May, 1946, in Paris young poet Jacques Prevel meets Antonin Artaud, the actor, artist, and writer just released from a mental asylum. Over ten months, we follow the mad Artaud from his cruel coaching of an actress in his "theatre of cruelty" to his semi-friendship with Prevel who buys him drugs and hangs on his every word. Meanwhile, Prevel divides his time between Jany, his blond, young, drug-hazed mistress, and Rolande, his dark-haired, long-suffering wife, who has a child during this time. Cruelty, neglect, poverty, egoism, madness, and the pursuit of art mix on the Left Bank.

Juliette is a young woman who has grown up on a farm that is now under economic siege. In order to save her farm and her family, Juliette is forced into a marriage of convenience with Marcel , a morose and laconic railway worker whom she does not even know. Now that her own life is permanently changed, her sacrifice does not ultimately help her family and with that sorrow added to her lonely existence, she is trapped into remaining married because of social pressures and soon enough, the birth of a child. There must surely be a way out for her at some point, but when and how that will happen seems completely up to fate alone.

After a businessman is captured by kidnappers, his rescue seems incumbent on a group of filmmakers, rather than a lackluster police force -- a premise that is matched by the rest of this movie. The kidnapping victim rambles on philosophically with his captors, who end up leaving him alone -- thereby providing him with a chance to escape. As he makes a break for it, he is literally hounded by some guard dogs. Then there are also some interviews with people who know one of the kidnappers, though it is not clear why. Neither the victim, nor the kidnappers, nor the filmmakers can compete with the canines, the only protagonists who add some bite to the action.

In the streets of Marseille, René Allio encounters, once again, the spaces of his childhood, and remembers his family history.