PRICELESS (HORS DE PRIX) by Pierre Salvadori

Amelie star Audrey Tautou shines in this delightful divertissement that has all the polish and champagne fizz of classic Hollywood romantic comedies. A glamorous gold-digger, she mistakes mild-mannered bar tender Glad Elmaleh for another easy target. He is so infatuated with her that he dare not confess the truth. Pushed beyond bankruptcy, he finds an unexpected solution when a rich widow assumes that he is a gigolo. The path of true love proves remarkably bumpy in a film of great charm and easy wit. GFF08

Friday 13 – Thursday 26 June

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (LE VOYAGE DU BALLON ROUGE) by Hsiao-hsien Hou

Loosely inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon (see below), Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s French-language debut gracefully extends his recent thematic concerns - specifically, the hectic pace and isolated nature of urban life - and relocates them to contemporary Paris. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a single mum with a harassed domestic life. She works for a Chinese puppet theatre company in Paris, and employs Song, a Chinese film student, as nanny to her little boy. Song and Simon amuse themselves with visions of a red balloon wandering across the Paris skies.

Friday 6 – Sunday 8 June

THE RED BALLOON/WHITE MANE by Albert Lamorisse

Lamorisse’s son Pascal plays a schoolboy who carries around a helium-filled balloon almost as big as his body. When his grandmother forces him to let the balloon go, it proves loyal, and follows Pascal around Paris. Lamorisse deploys phenomenal special effects to make the balloon bob and weave around walls and through windows in order to get back to its master. Three years before The Red Balloon, Lamorisse had his first international success with White Mane, another fable-like children’s film with strong documentary elements. Alain Emery plays a ragamuffin preteen fisherman who takes a liking to a wild horse, and does what he can to protect it from a band of trappers.

Tuesday 17 (12.45) & Thursday 18 June (1.30/6.15)

HEARTBEAT DETECTOR by Nicolas Klotz

Dispassionate yet with a veneer of slime, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) looks like he was born wearing a suit. He relishes his work as a corporate psychologist in the human resources division of the German firm FC Farb, a petrochemical company based in Paris. One day, assistant director Karl presents Simon with a new challenge: judge whether or not the film’s CEO, the aptly named Mathias Just, is, in fact, losing his mind. Simon’s search leads down an unexpected path, yielding more and more questions about the history of FC Farb, in particular, relating to what the company may have done during the war.

Monday 9 - Thursday 12 June

A SECRET by Claude Miller

Adapted by Miller and Natalie Carter from the Philippe Grimbert autobiographical novel, this stirring period portrait of a French family harbouring a dark past takes familiar subject matter and casts it in a provocative setting. Set primarily during the 1950s, the film is seen through the eyes of Francois Grimbert, a gawky, introverted 14-year-old who has always felt like a disappointment to his gregarious, athletic father and beautiful, former swim champ mother. There turns out to be justification for his deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, as Francois uncovers uncomfortable truths about his parents’ lives as a young Jewish couple living in France during the Occupation.

Monday 23 - Thursday 26 June

COUSCOUS by Abdel Kechiche

At the port of Sete Mr Slimani, a tired sixty year old, drags himself towards a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. He is a divorced father who forces himself to stay close to his family despite tensions which are easily sparked off and which financial difficulties make even more intense. He is going through a delicate period in his life and recently everything seems to make him feel useless: a failure. He wants to escape from it all and set up his own restaurant. However it appears to be an unreachable dream given his meagre salary that is not anywhere near enough to realise his ambition. But he can still dream and talk about it with his family in particular. A family which gradually re-compacts around his project which comes to symbolise the means to a better life. Thanks to their ingeniousness and hard work his dream soon becomes a reality... Or almost...

Friday 27 June - Thursday 3 July