Myriam's choice

By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.

Set in a magnificent villa near a sun-drenched St. Tropez, lovers Jean-Paul and Marianne are spending a happy, lazy summer holiday. Their only concern is to gratify their mutual passion - until the day when Marianne invites her former lover and his beautiful teenage daughter to spend a few days with them. From the first moment, a certain uneasiness and tension begin to develop between the four, which soon escalates in a dangerous love-game.

A series of events unfold like a chain reaction, all stemming from a minor event that brings the film's five characters together. Set in Paris, France, Anne is an actress whose boyfriend Georges photographs the war in Kosovo. Georges' brother, Jean, is looking for the entry code to Georges' apartment. These characters' lives interconnect with a Romanian immigrant and a deaf teacher.

Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.

Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after a year of high school, goes to live with his mother in the south of France; a harsher environment which rapidly changes his perception of friends, work, and women.

When Internal Affairs officer Stéphanie investigates a young man severely injured during a chaotic Paris demonstration and finds no police misconduct, the routine case hits close to home upon her discovering the victim is from her native town.

An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assassination.

Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.

1759, Mauritius Island, Indian Ocean. The island is controlled by French settlers and the deported slave population live in fear while toiling in the sugar cane plantations. Unlike her disillusioned father Massamba, 16-year-old Mati refuses to keep her head down and accept her fate.

Julien and Marie have enjoyed 15 years of seemingly stable marriage until Anaëlle, Julien’s childhood flame, returns. Her sudden presence awakens old insecurities in Marie, who begins to doubt Julien’s devotion and question her self-worth. Amid this emotional storm, Marie is drawn to Thomas, a charismatic stranger who offers her the validation she craves.

On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end and she will now have to support herself and her two teenage children. She finds work at a late-night radio show and encounters a troubled teenager named Talulah whom she invites into her home.

With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family.

An unlikely friendship between a dour, working class butcher and a repressed schoolteacher coincides with a grisly series of Ripper-type murders in a provincial French town.

The murder of her father sends a teenage tomboy on a mission of 'justice', which involves avenging her father's death. She recruits a tough old marshal, 'Rooster' Cogburn because he has 'true grit', and a reputation of getting the job done.

A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.

In the fall of 1994, a teacher at Chicago's run-down Steinmetz High conspires with the school's academic decathlon team to cheat on an academic competition.

A Midwestern husband and father announces his plan to have a sex change operation.

Antoine and Olga, a French couple, have been living in a small village in Galicia for a long time. They practice eco-responsible agriculture and restore abandoned houses to facilitate repopulation. Everything should be idyllic except for their opposition to a wind turbine project that creates a serious conflict with their neighbors. The tension will rise to the point of irreparability.

After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts, finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.

Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.

Sent from Seoul to serve in a remote coastal village, a policewoman gets involved in the life of a mysterious teenage girl who is abused by both her father and her grandmother.

The film mixes fiction, filmed documents and interviews which recounts the arrival in Paris of an Algerian immigrant lost in the metro. On December 27, 1968, France and Algeria signed an agreement which admitted each year 35,000 Algerian workers to French territory in the France of the Trente Glorieuses where the annual growth rate reached 5% and where factories lacked workers. Candidates obtain a residence permit valid for 5 years for themselves and their families. Paris is committed to improving professional training and housing conditions for immigrants, too often confined to the most thankless jobs and often housed in slums. A testimony on the living conditions of emigrant workers "economic cannon fodder" of neocolonialism which simultaneously develops its alter ego, institutionalized racism, as a tool of social stagnation and division of the proletarian class.

In 1955, a year after the birth of the National Liberation Front (FLN), Mahmoud was expelled from Algeria by the colonial authorities who feared his revolutionary speeches. At the age of 27, he arrived in the Algerian slum of Nanterre. Roughly questioned by FLN activists, in disagreement with the Algerian Nationalist Movement (MNA) who wanted to recognize theirs, he was then accepted as the local hairdresser and shoemaker. Subsequently, he became a driver during anti-MNA expeditions. Accepting increasingly dangerous missions, he is imprisoned by the French police and once again undergoes interrogations and special treatment by the police which will definitively undermine his sanity. One day, he no longer recognized his companions, and when joy broke out among the FLN militants, at the announcement of the signing of the Evian Accords, Mahmoud remained alone, frozen in an attitude of refusal, walled in his madness. Algeria has just won its independence.

In the middle of the Algerian war, Elise, from Bordeaux, “goes” to Paris to join her brother to earn her living in an automobile factory. There she meets Arezki, an Algerian nationalist activist with whom she falls in love. A chronicle of working life at the time and which highlights the extent of police repression against Algerians.

Long live the strike! Lucie Baud, one of the pioneers of the women's movement, went with creativity, fighting spirit and the power of singing against the weapons of male-dominated capitalist society in nineteenth-century France. The film, based on true events, describes the ambitious fight of a silk moth. She stood up for the rights of the female working class to end maltreatment and oppression once and for all. For the revolution in women's rights, she even put her family back and fought to the end for their beliefs.

An old North African man, sitting in an Algerian bar, remembers his life spent in France.

In the 1980s, barely 18 years after Algeria's independence, Algerian immigration to France massively fueled the construction industry, responding to a demand for hard, undervalued labor. Behind the idea of ​​"selective immigration," these men were recruited primarily for their bras and their knock-kneed hands, shaped by construction sites. Invisible yet essential, they built roads, buildings, and infrastructure, often at the cost of precarious conditions. Ali, an Algerian crane operator in France, philosophically accepts the harassment faced by immigrants like himself on construction sites and in daily life. He hopes to escape his situation with the money he wins in the lottery, and from the top of his crane, he allows himself to dream, observing the world through binoculars. One day, the jackpot falls...

Igor, aged 15, and his father Roger deal in housing and peddling illicit labor in the outlying districts of Liege, Belgium. Scams, lies and swindling rule their lives. When one of his father’s illegal workers gets injured on the job and asks Igor to promise to take care of his wife and baby, Igor finds himself at a crossroad. He wants to keep the promise, but the price would be to betray his father.

In 1971, the Algerian government nationalized hydrocarbons. The consequences of this decision on the community of Algerians in France are numerous. The Galti family is prey to these economic problems. The father, Khaled, former member of the F.L.N. in France, does not escape the sentence. Sharazade, his wife and comrade in combat, finds herself torn between her role as wife, mother and nostalgia for a country and a bygone past. As for his son Karim, a victim of socio-cultural division, all he has left is refusal.

After avenging the death of his teacher, a Shaolin monk flees China to the American West and helps people while being pursued by bounty hunters.

A construction worker on a construction site in the Paris suburbs, Mehdi takes the bus to return home after work. Wishing to get off while the vehicle is stationary in a traffic jam, the driver refuses: while restarting, the bus hits the car in front of it. The bus driver attacks Mehdi whom he holds responsible for the incident, claiming that it is forbidden to “talk to the stagehand”. Mehdi is implicated in court and his lawyer tries to draw attention to the living conditions of immigrant workers.

As usual, Slim goes to the Point Ephémère bar in Paris to have a last drink. As is often the case, he finds Lily there, an eccentric and intriguing character, then Seiko, whom he knew as a child soldier, once in Sierra Leone. While he listens to Lily tell him a few stories, Slim watches the Seiko ride, tracked and soon arrested by two plainclothes police officers.

The Three Cousins ​​is a comedy-drama by René Vautier released in 1970 about the living conditions of three Algerian immigrant cousins ​​looking for work in Paris. Housed in a narrow construction shed, the coal stove will cause them to suffocate. The Three Cousins ​​won the Best Human Rights Film Award in Strasbourg in 1970.

In a working-class immigrant neighborhood slated for demolition, Jo, the son of Ali, known as the Rescuer from the Algerian war, lives idle and delinquent, committing small assaults to pay for his drugs. One day, while attacking Slim's bar, he is arrested by Ben, a young beur cop torn between his roots and the imperatives of his mission to maintain public order. Giving in to the respect and friendship he feels for Ali, Ben agrees to release his son. But alas, far from calming down, Jo drifts deeper into violence, until the inevitable drama.

For more than ten years, Algeria has been living a slow war, a war without a front line but having caused more than 100,000 deaths. It is this desert that Zina and Kamel – two young Algerians, sometimes hallucinated and joyful, sometimes dejected and serene – will want to travel one last time before leaving it for elsewhere. A road movie on the territories of a city, Algiers whose construction sites are in decline. Roma wa la n'touma will show that fleeing abroad is not is not a refusal of combat, but an obscure struggle against assignment.

In the 1980s, young people of North African descent born in France and a priest from the Lyon suburbs organized the "March of the Beurs." Launched on October 15, 1983, by seventeen people from the La Cayolle neighborhood in Marseille following a racist crime, the march concluded two months later—on December 3—on the streets of Paris, with 100,000 participants. This movement demanded equal rights. Was their cry heard?

From the “integration model” to the “Islamist fanatic”, France fantasizes about these children of immigrants who grew up with it. Like every month “What I’m Meddling With!” presents portraits, the result of an in-depth investigation, to give a face to today's questions. The program, broadcast in the thematic evening of the Franco-German channel Arte, is made up of 2 ambivalent documentaries: "Les Lumières De La Zone" and "Les Soldats De Dieu" followed by debates.

Cheikh El-Hasnaoui is an Algerian singer who left his country in 1937 without ever setting foot there again. Between 1939 and 1968 he composed most of his repertoire in France. For many years the Algerian cafes of Paris were the stages of his shows. With a handful of artists of his generation, he laid the foundations of modern Algerian song. A fervent defender of women's rights, he claims, as a pioneer, the fight for identity for a plural Algeria. At the end of the Sixties, he ended his artistic career. On July 6, 2002 he died in Saint-Pierre de la Réunion, where he is buried to this day. This 80-minute documentary follows in the footsteps of this extraordinary character. From Kabylia to Saint-Pierre de a Réunion via the Casbah of Algiers and the belly of Paris.