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The regular major-festival presence of the films of Robert Guédiguian is a curious, if not wholly unwelcome, anomaly. Amid punchier, more provocative, more aesthetically challenging arthouse titles, his work moves to the calmer rhythms of classical naturalism, in which each new title feels more like a new chapter in a career-spanning novel — or a book of interconnected short stories, perhaps — about life and love and social class in the suburbs of Marseille.

Working with the same troupe of excellent actors he has cast in differing permutations through the years, most notably his wife Ariane Ascaride who stars in their twentieth collaboration here, and occupying the same compassionately observed, elegiac register that his mid-to-late middle-age titles have tended to embrace, “Gloria Mundi” is, again, a contemporary, intergenerational, socially conscientious, bittersweet family drama set in the southern French port city. And, at least until an ending marred by some scrappy filmmaking as...

Paris-based company will also begin selling Robert Guédiguian’s ‘Gloria Mundi’.

Paris-based sales company mk2 will kick off sales on Manele Labidi’s Tunisia-set comedy-drama Arab Blues, starring Golshifteh Farahani, at the Unifrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris (Jan 17-21).

Farahani, whose recent credits include Girls Of The Sun and Paterson, plays a psychoanalyst who opens up a practice in a working-class suburb of the Tunisian capital Tunis not long after the country’s 2011 revolution and attempts to treat a procession of colourful clients.

“It is a sophisticated comedy in the way it offers a fascinating window into modern Tunisia at a crossroads,...

Siblings reunite and re-evaluate their lives and relationships in this self-regarding variation on a theme

Robert Guédiguian has returned to Marseille, with its bright, fresh sunshine and the Mediterranean’s habitual dazzling blue. It never seems to rain in his Marseille – maybe to compensate for the bad psychological weather.

Again, Guédiguian has assembled his family-repertory cast of veterans. Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Gérard Meylan play middle-aged siblings Angèle, Joseph and Armand, who are uneasily reunited when their widowed father suffers a stroke, and they have to work out how they feel about each other and about their hometown.

Three middle-aged siblings find themselves in their titular childhood home after their father has had a stroke in The House by the Sea (La Villa), another workmanlike and working-class story against the backdrop of the Marseille area that has the gentle rhythms and knowing ways of most of French filmmaker Robert Guediguian’s output. It also again stars his regular actors, including Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Gerard Meylan, which provides the kind of continuity that allows the director to throw in a flashback to 30-odd years earlier by just editing in a piece of his 1985 film Ki Lo Sa.

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Exclusive: Company also adds new films by Guédiguian, Moussaoui and Risuleo on eve of Cannes.

Paris-based MK2 Films will launch sales in Cannes on an upcoming bio-doc about 1960s icon Marianne Faithfull [pictured] by French actress and director Sandrine Bonnaire.

Simply entitled Faithfull, it will follow the singer’s life journey, from being discovered at the age of 17 in 1960s ‘Swinging London’; to her rock ‘n’ roll life with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger; her battle with drugs and alcohol addiction and rebirth as a performer in later life.

Developed in close co-operation with Faithfull, it is set to feature interviews with Jagger, Salman Rushdie, Anselm Kiefer, Nick Cave and Damon Albarn.

It is Bonnaire’s second documentary after My Name Is Sabine, about her severely autistic sister, which premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2007. Paris-based Cinétéve is producing, with the backing of Arte, for a 2017 delivery.

New Talents: Moussaoui and Risuleo

The documentary is among four new...

Hovering around the twenty-one to twenty-four feature film mark with at least a quarter of those films belonging to first time filmmakers, the Quinzaine des Realisateurs (a.k.a Directors’ Fortnight) has in the past couple of years, counted on a healthy supply of French, Spanish and Belgium produced film items, and has been geared towards the offbeat genre items as with last year’s edition curated by Edouard Waintrop and co. To be unveiled on the 22nd, as we attempted with our Critics’ Week predix, Blake Williams, Nicholas Bell and I (Eric Lavallee) are thinking out loud and hedging our bets on what the section might look like or what the programmers might be looking at for 2014. Here is our predictions overview:

Alleluia

Six years after presenting Vinyan at the Venice Film Festival, Fabrice Du Welz finally returns with potentially not one, but a pair of works for the ’14 campaign.

• Today's nine title announcement for the Berlin Festival’s main competition section (the 58th edition runs between Feb. 7-17.) is an early sign that the 2008 year in film is rich in international film from all corners of the globe and that the upcoming Cannes film festival is going to be loaded once again with heavyweight titles. Out of the titles I'm most looking forward to seeing are the little known Mike Leigh project called Happy-Go-Lucky and Erick Zonca’s French thriller Julia starring Tilda Swinton, and the postponed domestic release of Isabel Coixet’s Elegy. Here is the 9-list:Feuerherz (Heart of Fire) Germany/Austria (adapted from the bestseller by Senait Mehari) by Luigi Falorni (The Story of the Weeping Camel) with Letekidan Micael Julia France by Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels) with Tilda Swinton, Aidan Gould, Saúl Rubinek Lady Jane France By Robert Guédiguian (Le Promeneur du champ de Mars,

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