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French actor-turned-director Stéphane Freiss started shooting in Italy Monday on “Face à Toi,” a drama toplining emerging French star Lou de Laâge and Italy’s Riccardo Scamarcio (“Three Floors”), set against the backdrop of the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.

De Laâge plays the 25-year-old Esther who has always lived in a very close-knit Jewish Orthodox community in the south of France and is looking to break out of religious constrictions.

De Laâge, who won France’s Cesar Award for most promising young actress in 2013 for her role in Christian Duguay’s “Jappeloup,” more recently played the lead in Anne Fontaine’s 2016 “The Innocents,” which went to Sundance. She also starred in Fontaine’s “White as Snow,” in 2019, opposite Isabelle Huppert.

Scamarcio, who is among Italy’s top box office draws, plays the older Elio who left his father’s farm in Southern Italy to attend art school in Rome,...

Exclusive: French company also unveils first deals on Jean-Claude Brisseau’s erotic 3D drama Tempting Devils.

Paris-based genre specialist WTFilms has taken on international sales of mainstream, same-sex romantic comedy Kiss Me! (Embrasse Moi!) in which the protagonist falls for a woman with 76 ex-girlfriends and a crazy family.

The company will kick-off sales on the title, which is in post-production, at the Unifrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema this week.

French stand-up comedian Océanerosemarie – best known for her one woman show La Lesbienne Invisible – makes her directorial and big screen debut in the film.

She plays a happy-go-lucky osteopath who falls for the beautiful Cécile, an artist who has taken a personal vow of celibacy after a series of failed relationships.

Alice Pol plays Cécile. The actress’s other recent credits include Dany Boon’s latest comedy Raid Special Unit (Raid Dingue) in which she co-stars as a hopeless special police force recruit. That film is...

Dear Prudence (Belle épine) is a new French flick about the dark side of underground teen street-bike racing in Paris. !

Rebecca Zlotowski wrote and directed this strange little movie known as Belle épine in its native tongue and Dear Prudence for all the Americans. It's going to screen later this month at the 2010 Vancouver Film Festival and stars Léa Seydoux, Anaïs Demoustier, Agathe Schlencker, Johan Libéreau, Guillaume Gouix, Anna Sigalevitch, Michaël Abiteboul, and Marie Matheron

Paris in the 1980s. 17-year-old Prudence Friedmann (the gifted Léa Seydoux) has just lost her mother. Left to her own devices in the family apartment, she enjoys this sudden freedom along with her new friend Marilyne. They both start frequenting the dangerous illegal racing track at Rungis, where big-engined cars and souped-up motorbikes drive around chaotically.

In any case, there isn't a freakin' real trailer up for this, just a clip, of the lead character...

The title of Michael Haneke’s 1997 film, “Funny Games,” would have been just as appropriate a moniker for his second French-language feature as “The Piano Teacher.” Pic joins a number of recent Gallic excursions into the sexual twilight zone such as “Romance,” “Baise-Moi” and “Intimacy” in pontificating loftily on the kind of punishing coitus you probably never want to have. Opening intriguingly, with a taut first half distinguished by genuinely transgressive moments and a fascinatingly prickly characterization from lead Isabelle Huppert, the psychodrama then slips off the rails, unraveling into increasingly ugly ludicrousness. While it may score some degree of travel solely on the strength of its enticing themes, only true devotees of the Austrian director will be lining up for lessons.

The drama was adapted by Haneke from the novel by fellow Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, a work that challenges standard notions of permissible female sexuality while at the...