Yannick Bellon:
The Happy Pessimist

Unlike anything else in French cinema of the 1970s. Without moralizing, Bellon offers a harrowing depiction of the damage wrought upon Paris by rapid urban change, through the story of two couples, one a pair of young professionals, the other among the city’s older residents. Unquestionably Bellon’s most personal and intimate film.

Two documentaries on the lives of cities, and a delicate tale of a boy and camel. Bellon, ever the intrepid explorer, reports on two of the most mythologized cities on earth, Los Angeles and Venice, and, with Zaa, shows another side of herself, the lover of animals and children, in a land far from France.

Claire (Bulle Ogier), following the suicide of an old friend (Loleh Bellon), looks through her belongings as we glimpse a few days in her life as she reflects on her past and determines her future through objects and a kaleidoscope of people.

The story of a woman afflicted with a sudden and potentially terminal breast cancer diagnosis, which Bellon uses as a pretext to explore the possibility of happiness—particularly romantic—under dire and confusing circumstances. To endure it with dignity and moral strength is, in Bellon’s view, to truly exist.

A crime film with all the classic ingredients of pacing and tension, murder and blackmail, but it is in fact a trompe-l’œil. In Bordeaux, a murder investigation draws us into another inquiry, more secret, of the love affair between a young musician and a bisexual police inspector “beyond all suspicion,” revealing a double identity.

Bellon tackles hunting, conservation and the related political and financial interests of both. Taking place in the Dombes region of Eastern France, L’Affût is another of Bellon’s love stories of people with chaotic and painful pasts, return to old memories, not expecting to make the connections that they do.