3 Femmes

Five women's impressions of being single.

On these rare images of many lettrist protests, the director evokes all the creative women of History through the symbolic figure of Joan of Arc. This film was actually completed by Maurice Lemaître. The soundtrack is in French from the trial of Joan of Arc

Portraits of contemporary African women from four West African nations: Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Benin.

A remake of a pre-war French film success, Club de femmes is a seriocomedy centralized in an all-female boarding house. Forced to band together because of a housing shortage, the film's heroines set up camp in a deserted structure, despite the tongue-cluckings of local busybodies and do-gooders. Complications ensue when a huge corporation announces plans to raze the building and erect a factory. Amazingly, the ladies are saved by the very company that wants to evict them.

The wealthy industrialist Alain de Narbois has disappeared. Michel Dunant, an idle man who passed by and who looks exactly like the deceased, is taken for Alain by a young woman and her servant. He jumps at the chance but quickly realizes that, in this hushed little world, masters and servants play comedy and know very well that he is only a double of Alain. In fact, the industrialist was assassinated.

The agency À Votre Service has the reputation of meeting all needs. This is what Stanislas observes when his uncle replaces his mistress with a fiancée provided by the agency.

Single channel video projection, which documents an attempt to dramatically re-enact a 1977 interview conducted between the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, and journalist Catherine Chaîne, which was published in 'Le Nouvel Observateur' journal. The project develops from a number of previous projects Byrne has realised, each of which similarly engage a collective amnesia about our shifting cultural history, through dramatic re-enactments of culturally loaded conversations and interviews gleaned from discarded popular magazines. With Homme à Femmes (Michel Debrane) Byrne focuses on a generically candid encounter with Sartre, which discusses his relationship with women throughout his life, at a moment towards the end of that life.

Women of the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) are shown creating pottery.

"They were thousands to dance at the Université libre de Paris 8 in the Bois de Vincennes where we were following the classes of Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman, as well as those of Gilles Deleuze. A fire of joy shared by all generations. With my sister Magda, my mother Bozena, my great-aunt Hanna, Laurence and all the friends."

Using images from online amateur porn videos, Deux Femmes recreates pornographic footage shot by Man Ray and found in the artist's atelier after his death. Closely following the compositions of Ray's original film, director Ann Oren presents printed frames from online videos in a stack directly below the camera—adding a single frame to the stack every few seconds. The unhurried process of stacking the images by hand slows the otherwise speedy consumption of pornographic media in a nod to Ray's preoccupation with the female body as sculpture.

This documentary follows a number of French women prisoners during the time of their imprisonment and after their release. Many of them are "in" for minor drug and prostitution-related offenses, and at least half of them are HIV positive. One woman promises she will kill herself before her beauty fades from the AIDS syndrome: two years later the filmmaker captures her, wan and wasted, but out of prison. Most of these women have grave difficulties finding work or housing when they are released, and are forced to resort to the same desperate measures that got them incarcerated in the first place.

Two women living together, between the silence and the secrets of their past relations. Two women who are dependent from each other, from the pain and from the memories. But the present issues seems to change the nature of their relation. Two women looking for different paths. Two woman try to understand the nature of themselves.