Roger Vadim Plemiannikov was a French screenwriter, film director and producer, as well as an author, artist and occasional actor. His best-known works are visually lavish films with erotic qualities, such as And God Created Woman (1956), Blood and Roses (1960), Barbarella (1968), and Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971).
Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time, although he directed only six feature-length films.
Gérard Philipe was a prominent French actor who appeared in 32 films between 1944 and 1959. He came to prominence during the later period of the poetic realism movement of French Cinema in the late 1940s. His best known credits include Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949), Beauty and the Devil (1950), Fan Fan the Tulip (1953), Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Les liaisons dangereuses (1959).
Jules Auguste Muraire, whose stage name was Raimu, was a French actor. He is most famous for playing César in the 'Marseilles trilogy'.
Josiane Balasko is a French actress, writer, and director. She has been nominated seven times for César Awards, and won twice.
Alexandre Michel Gérard Desplat is a French film composer and conductor. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career spanning over four decades, including, two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, three César Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Grammy Awards. Desplat was made an Officer of the Ordre national du Mérite and a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres both in 2016.
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16–17 July 1942. The roundup was one of several aimed at eradicating the Jewish population in France, both in the occupied zone and in the free zone that took place in 1942, as part of Opération Vent printanier. Planned by René Bousquet, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Theodor Dannecker and Helmut Knochen; It was the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust.
Pierre Schoendoerffer was a French film director, a screenwriter, a writer, a war reporter, a war cameraman, a renowned First Indochina War veteran, a cinema academician. He was president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts for 2001 and for 2007.
Jacques Goddet was a French sports journalist and director of the Tour de France road cycling race from 1936 to 1986.
The Révolution nationale was the official ideological program promoted by the Vichy regime which had been established in July 1940 and led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain's regime was characterized by anti-parliamentarism, personality cultism, xenophobia, state-sponsored anti-Semitism, promotion of traditional values, rejection of the constitutional separation of powers, modernity, and corporatism, as well as opposition to the theory of class conflict. Despite its name, the ideological policies were reactionary rather than revolutionary as the program opposed almost every change introduced to French society by the French Revolution.
Travail, famille, patrie was the tripartite motto of the French State during World War II. It replaced the republican motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité of the Third French Republic.
Marie Dubois was a Parisian-born French actress.
Vichy France, officially the French State, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
Vénus aveugle is a 1941 French film melodrama, directed by Abel Gance, and one of the first films to be undertaken in France during the German occupation.
Ève Francis was an actress and film-maker. She was born in Belgium but spent most of her career in France. She became closely associated with the writer Paul Claudel, and she was married to the critic and film-maker Louis Delluc.
The Well-Digger's Daughter is a 2011 French Romantic Drama film. Daniel Auteuil makes his directorial debut as he stars alongside Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Kad Merad, Sabine Azéma, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, and Nicolas Duvauchelle.
Playing with Fire is a 1975 French-Italian comedy-drama film written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Life Dances On or Christine or Dance Program is a 1937 French drama film directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Marie Bell, Françoise Rosay and Louis Jouvet. It was partly shot at the Neuilly Studios in Paris. The film's art direction was by Jean Douarinou. Duvivier's American film Lydia (1941) is to some extent a remake of this one.
A Girl at the Window is a Canadian drama film, directed by Francis Leclerc and released in 2001. The film stars Fanny Mallette as Marthe, a young woman living in Quebec City in the 1920s; afflicted with an incurable heart condition which will eventually kill her, she is ostensibly in Quebec City to study classical piano, but decides to live for the moment and get more enjoyment out of the time she has after being exposed to the city's jazz nightclubs.
Elissa Rhaïs, born Rosine Boumendil was a Jewish-Algerian writer, who adopted the persona of a Muslim woman who had escaped from a harem to further her literary career. Her novels were popular in her lifetime, but declined; interest in her life was revived in the 1980s by a claim that all her publications had been ghost-written and that she was illiterate.
