Les Films du Passage

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

"Maine-Ocean" is the name of a train that rides from Paris to Saint-Nazaire (near the ocean). In that train, Dejanira, a Brazilian, has a brush with the two ticket inspectors. Mimi, another traveler and also a lawyer, helps her. The four of them will meet together later and live a few shifted adventures with a strange-speaking sailor (Mimi's client).

During the century of the Spanish Gold, Doña Prouhèze, wife of a nobleman, deeply loves Don Rodrigo, who is forced to leave Spain and go to America. Meanwhile Prouhèze is sent to Africa to rule the city of Mogador. Ten years later Rodrigo leaves America and travels to Africa in search of Prouhèze to find out that she died and eventually meeting her daughter.

Two quarreling lovers from opposite sides of the economic scale take central stage in this drama about Veronique and Adrien. Veronique is wealthy and from the provinces, Adrien is impoverished and his ancestors come from Brittany. In spite of their different backgrounds, the two fall in love, marry, and eventually have a baby girl. At just about that time, Veronique decides to go back to school, and Adrien becomes both mother and father to their baby. Unable to cope with Veronique's new-found intellectual friends and different lifestyle, Adrien clashes with her, and their arguments lead to a separation for awhile. The two then get back together again, but not for long. It is on a return trip from visiting his mother in Brittany that Adrien's life undergoes a dramatic change, and his story takes an equally unexpected turn.

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

An island retreat. A man, his face bandaged, plays cards nonchalantly. His ex-wife arrives. Conversations happen.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

Imagine a slightly dilapidated three star hotel in the tenth arrondissement run by a very distinguished lady with moral fibre and panache, Mrs. Coppercage. Alongside tourists visiting Paris, Mrs. Coppercage rents three rooms to three women at a monthly rate. Each woman is marked by life, yet they go on as best they can, never closing their eyes to the world around them, or to the men who impatiently await them. Faubourg Saint Martin opens as a love story and ends like a song as shots ring out and punctuate the chorus.

The french dancer America is in a hotel in Paris with her lover. He goes out to buy cigarettes and she imagines that he travels to Mexico, where he makes a cabaret number dancing with a mannequin that represents the devil. It is related to the gigolo Jimmy, who prostitutes and explodes, and wanders around the city getting involved in a strange plot with some gangsters.

Director Jorge Silva Melo has developed a viable, though highly intellectual mystery story about the world of art and culture and murder in this somewhat theatrical presentation. When German artist Bernd Hoffmann (Michael König) arrives in Lisbon to oversee the installation of his paintings in a joint exhibition with another Berlin artist, Hanna Brauer (Charlotte Schwab), Hanna never shows up. Hoffmann is puzzled because he is certain he saw a video sequence with Hanna at the exhibition, and he begins to look for her. Another Lisbon cultural center, a theater, is also having problems that may or may not be related -- and the mystery deepens when Hanna is found dead, either by her own hand, or murdered.