Camus famously summed up the story like this: A man who does not cry at his mother's funeral will be condemned. Thus, the novel begins: 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know,' introducing Meursault's flat, noncommittal tone.
What begins as a fairy-tale romance set in the beautiful Mediterranean town of Agde gets more complicated when Stann's family ties prove more durable, and dangerous, than he expects. Stann, the hub of a sprawling, criminally inclined clan, finds himself torn between Gloria, a vibrant Black American woman who offers him a glimpse at a life beyond the one he knows, and his inescapable family obligations.
Whether you're thinking of moving for work, for political reasons - and the French are very sympathetic to Americans' situation - or for love (of a person or of croissants), here's our checklist of how to move to France as an American Checklist: How to move to France as an American Is there a legal way of avoiding inheritance tax in France by passing your property onto your children while you're still alive?
Hailing from the producers of French smash hit comedy " The Intouchables" and Oscar-wining " CODA," the film "Lady Liberty" will tell the backstory behind the birth of the Statue of Liberty, "tracing the artistic audacity of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the political vision of Édouard de Laboulaye, and the engineering ingenuity of Gustave Eiffel," said Quad Cinéma and Gemma Pictures in a joint release.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
It would be hard to overstate the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on traditions of realism in European cinema. The Belgian brothers, now in their seventies, have been making compassionate, uncompromising dramas about the social and economic conditions of modern life for nearly 40 years, approaching each with a direct, unvarnished style that's been imitated far and wide across the international arthouse circuit, if seldom rivaled in its emotional impact.
The Voice of Hind Rajab has been nominated for an Academy Award for best international feature, a recognition for the Tunisian film that features the voice of a 5-year-old girl whose phone call begging for help was heard across the world before she was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. The film is a mix of a documentary and drama that weaves in the recordings of Hind's phone call along with scripted, dramatized scenes of Palestinian Red Crescent dispatchers as they agonized over trying to save her. It was nominated alongside four other films.
an Act of Killing-style re-enactment of the 1919 conquest of the Adriatic city of what is now Rijeka by a rag-tag army assembled by the proto-fascist dandy-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. It was precisely the kind of quirky cinematic gem that the European film awards should be there to champion: a film ignored by the main festivals, about an overlooked but relevant episode in history.
Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay "The Death of the Author" that a writer's biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted the opposite in her novel, : "Everything is copy." Today's pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron's take: Confession fuels the biggest songs; celebrity memoirs dominate best-seller lists.
The film tells the true story of Hind, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2024 as she and her family tried to evacuate Gaza City, blending recordings of real emergency calls with dramatic re-enactments. It draws on harrowing audio from Hind Rajab's call to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, in which rescuers tried to reassure her as she lay trapped in a bullet-ridden car with the bodies of her aunt, uncle and three cousins, who had all been killed by Israeli fire.
My value as a person is not reliant on me being nominated for anything or being snubbed. It's such a constructed reality. It's not a real competition. We made something months ago, and now we're putting it in a pot, and somebody's going to choose one.
"That was new to me, that a director took that time that early in the process to get to know the people who he's auditioning, which I thought was brilliant because he really gets to know you and you get to know him. It's a mutual testing of each other. And I had a really lovely conversation with him that made me feel very safe and respected, and I think that affected the way the audition went, to be honest."
After dozens of films over a storied six-decade career, Jodie Foster is trying something new, playing the lead role in a French film for the very first time. There's hardly a trace of an American accent in Foster's turn as Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner in A Private Life (Vie privee) and she appears to be very much at home. The character she plays is an American woman who built her career in France.