The 40 Best Films Set in France

Cinema has always treated France, and Paris in particular, as an ideal backdrop, a canvas of grandeur and romanticism. There are the classic masterpieces that built this myth—and you will find them here. But the true cinematic France is also revealed beyond the clichés, in the frontiers, the peripheries, and the silent struggles that define the nation.

This definitive guide is a journey that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most radical independent productions. It is a critical map of works that have refused the easy postcard, focusing instead on the analysis of cinematic geographies where the choice of location is a political act.

Art et Essai cinema is distinguished by a strong policy focused on quality, in stark contrast to criteria of pure profitability. This precarity translates into an aesthetic choice: filming in unusual locations or transforming the environment into a co-star. It is an exploration that gives voice to stories considered less profitable.

I. Paris Labyrinth: Existential, Political, and Underground Cinema

Paris is inevitably a nerve center, but in independent cinema, it ceases to be the backdrop of the dream to become the stage of disillusionment, post-ideological verbosity, and subterranean conspiracy. The city is filtered through radical lenses, from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a swamp of bored intellectuals, to the silent banlieues, and down to the genuine underground recesses.

La Maman et la Putain

Alexandre is a lazy, verbose, unemployed young man who spends his days in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, financially supported by his older partner Marie, who owns a boutique. His narcissistic routine is interrupted by meeting Véronika, a penniless nurse, initiating an exhausting and complex love triangle based on endless dialogues about freedom and post-May 1968 disillusionment.

The Parisian setting in this film is fundamental. Jean Eustache transforms Saint-Germain-des-Prés from a bohemian intellectual hub into a genuine existential cage. The apartments are claustrophobic, the cafés are smoky theaters of conversations that lead nowhere. The radical independence of the film, manifested in its monumental length and the choice of static shots, uses the famous Left Bank to amplify the characters’ sense of intellectual alienation and emotional great nothingness. The city, instead of inspiring, isolates.

Out 1: Noli me tangere

A monumental work of nearly thirteen hours, the film follows two Parisian theater troupes engaged in improvisation exercises based on the myth of Aeschylus. Simultaneously, two lonely individuals, Frédérique and Colin, investigate an alleged secret conspiracy called ‘The Thirteen‘, whose members might be hidden among the streets of Paris, in a tangle inspired by Balzac that reflects the failure of political utopias.

Jacques Rivette deploys Paris as a labyrinth of incomprehensible clues and locations emptied of meaning. The metropolis becomes a living, cryptic organism, explored with the aesthetic of cinéma vérité grafted onto a fictional, open narrative structure. The use of marginal urban spaces, experimental theaters, and anonymous markets is a manifesto of French experimental cinema, a map of incommunicability that exploits the immensity of Paris to highlight the fragility of human and political connection.

Le Coup du berger

A brief but fundamental debut by Jacques Rivette, the film tells the story of Claire, a woman married to a wealthy industrialist. When she receives an expensive fur coat as a gift from her lover, she must orchestrate a complex stratagem to justify its possession to her husband. It is an acute examination of power games and deception within the Parisian bourgeoisie.

The film is set almost entirely in luxurious and suffocating Parisian interiors. This spatial choice is essential for the critique: Paris is not seen as a place of freedom, but as a theater of rigid social conventions and class hypocrisy. Rivette uses the bourgeois space, where every object has a price and a social function, to construct a cold and calculated narrative mechanism.

Les Amants réguliers

Set in Paris in 1968, the film follows François, a young poet who participates in the barricades of the Latin Quarter. After the failure of the revolt, he takes refuge in an apartment with friends, living an apolitical, disillusioned existence, interrupted by the meeting with Lilie, a young sculptor who embodies a fragile hope.

Philippe Garrel films Paris in melancholy black and white, transforming the Latin Quarter not into the vibrant center of the student revolution, but into a place of retreat and stasis. The long scenes in the apartments, illuminated by the faint light of dawn, reflect the post-traumatic apathy of a generation. Paris here is the city of ghosts of recent history, where the real battle is fought in the internal spaces of the soul.

L’Amour fou

Another monumental work by Rivette, following a theater director (Sébastien) and his wife (Claire, an actress) as they stage a Racine play. The tensions between art and marital life, filmed partly in 16mm for a documentary effect, lead to a slow and obsessive disintegration of their relationship.

The action takes place between Parisian theaters and apartments, places that Rivette uses to confuse the boundaries between performance and reality. The city is the container of artistic neurosis. The duality between the cold 35mm (for the theatrical representation) and the grainy 16mm (for private life) transforms Paris into a fragmented and unreliable set, a perfect example of auteur cinema that deconstructs spatial perception.

Une femme douce

Based on Dostoevsky, Robert Bresson’s film tells the story of a Parisian pawnbroker who tries to understand his young wife’s suicide, revisiting their brief and tormented relationship. The entire narrative is a monologue that unfolds around the woman’s body, lying on the bed.

Paris is reduced to the essential: bare interiors and windows overlooking the Seine, a river that becomes a metaphor for a path of no return. Bresson eliminates every picturesque detail of the capital, focusing on emotional oppression. The urban setting is stripped of any romanticism to serve the director’s stylistic ascetism and moral inquiry.

Un Baiser volé

Antoine Doinel, discharged from the army, tries to find his place in life and love, juggling various jobs and his persistent infatuation with Christine Darbon. The film is a charming portrait of Parisian youth in the late sixties, full of mistakes and sweet misunderstandings.

Although more accessible than Eustache, Truffaut sets the film in an unpolished, but lived-in Montmartre and Paris. Antoine’s streets, boutiques, and modest interiors define a credible and intimate setting. The film captures the Nouvelle Vague in its most mature and melancholy phase, using the city as a backdrop for personal growth rather than grand dramas.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Although the title refers to Brussels, Chantal Akerman operated between Belgium and France, and her cinema had a crucial impact on French film criticism. This masterpiece meticulously follows three days in the routine life of a widow who prostitutes herself in the afternoon, exposing the mechanical nature of her domestic existence up to a final act of rupture.

The domestic environment, though located in Brussels, reflects the urban anonymity and female marginality typical of large European cities, including Paris. Akerman’s independence is manifested in the extended duration and the rigorous filming that rejects conventional narrative.

Le Cochon

A documentary medium-length film that meticulously follows the process of slaughtering a pig on a French farm. Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol show all phases without censorship, from the slaughter to the preparation of the meat.

This film, often seen as a brutal appendix to Eustache’s existential filmography, is a direct confrontation with rural reality and the physical violence of agricultural labor. Although not set in Paris, its production by a Parisian author creates a crucial dichotomy, bringing the intellectual gaze of the capital into a context of pure survival, challenging the idealization of the French countryside.

Sans soleil

An unconventional essay film by Chris Marker, assembling a collage of images and reflections through the letters of an imaginary cameraman. Although most of the filming takes place in Japan and Africa, Paris serves as an emotional and intellectual reference point for the narrator’s voice.

Paris appears through fragments of memory or as a place of archives and reflection. Marker, a key figure in French experimental cinema, uses the capital as a mental location from which to observe and deconstruct the world. The film demonstrates that France, for the independent author, can also exist as a geographical and philosophical concept, not just as a physical set.

II. Satirical Borders: From the South-East to the Pyrenees, Anti-Paris Cinema

For many independent filmmakers, true resistance lies in the explicit rejection of Paris, a reaction often satirical or deeply personal against cultural centralization. This section explores the location insolite: the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the deep province, where geography itself becomes a tool of social critique.

Brigitte et Brigitte

Two students, both named Brigitte, arrive at Austerlitz station in Paris to study at the Sorbonne, one hailing from the remote Alps, the other from the Pyrenees. Luc Moullet’s film is a satirical portrait of student life and cinephilia, dotted with cameos by famous directors. The two girls, although united by name and clothing, represent the different Frances of the periphery colliding with the capital.

The work is an anti-Paris manifesto based on geography. Moullet uses the contrast between the isolation of the Alps and the Pyrenees (villages without electricity) and the “tricky splendour” of Paris, full of scaffolding and unfulfilled promises. The satire is based on the conviction that the true “average Frenchwoman” does not exist and that identity is shaped by regional roots, a subversive concept for centralist cinema.

The Smugglers (Les Contrebandiers)

Set in the rugged Southern Alps, the film follows a love triangle among smugglers. Brigitte and Francesca find themselves in a deadly competition for Johnny’s love, in a plot that spills into a decontextualized noir.

Luc Moullet, fond of his location insolite, chooses the Alps, a border region of savage unpredictability, as a conscious rejection of the intellectual cinema of the 1960s that took place in Parisian living rooms. The mountain landscape, with its logistical difficulties, becomes an integral part of the narrative about morality and greed, amplifying an anti-rationalist tone uninterested in urban social issues.

Mes petites amoureuses

After the tumult of La Maman et la Putain, Jean Eustache returns to his roots, filming the autobiographical story of Daniel, a pre-adolescent sent to live with his mother and grandmother in Pessac, in the Gironde department. The film is an elegiac meditation on first romantic disappointments and the discovery of adult reality in the boredom of the province.

Pessac serves as the spatial antithesis of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Gironde is depicted as a place of waiting and stasis, where time seems to flow more slowly. Eustache uses this location insolite to explore emotional formation in a context where opportunities are scarce, demonstrating how the poverty of provincial stimuli can be as determining as the noise of the capital.

La Fiancée du pirate

Marie, a marginalized young woman living in a shack on the edge of a Breton village, decides to take revenge on the pettiness and hypocrisy of her neighbors by blackmailing them with their secrets.

Nelly Kaplan directs an anarchic satire that uses rural Brittany as a container for fierce criticism of bourgeois morality. The village is not picturesque, but oppressive and full of bigotry. Geographical isolation amplifies the community’s meanness, making Marie’s revenge an act of liberation, not only personal but also geographical.

La Souriante Madame Beudet

Considered a masterpiece of early feminist cinema, Germaine Dulac’s silent film portrays Madame Beudet, an unsatisfied woman who fantasizes about murdering her indifferent husband, in a context of provincial bourgeois interiors.

The French province, here, is a place of mental seclusion. The settings, although not specifically named, are typical of a rich and oppressive bourgeois life far from the capital, where dreams and fantasy violently clash with marital banality. Dulac uses interiors as prisons, demonstrating that oppression can be total even without the evidence of an urban context.

L’Argent de poche

François Truffaut leaves Paris for Thiers, a small town in Auvergne, to narrate a summer through the eyes of children. The film explores the small joys and great dramas of childhood, including abuse and economic hardship.

The use of Thiers, a provincial city with hills and old buildings, gives the film an atmosphere of realism and unforced nostalgia. The provincial setting allows Truffaut to focus on community life and the cycles of growth, a more intimate approach compared to his Parisian films, highlighting auteur cinema in its exploration of roots.

Fin août, début septembre

Olivier Assayas explores the relationships and anxieties of a group of Parisian thirty-somethings, focusing particularly on Gabriel, a precarious writer who must face his friend Adrien’s illness. The narrative shifts between Paris and a country house where the characters seek refuge from their crises.

The transition between the frantic metropolis and the temporary calm of the French countryside is crucial. Assayas uses the geographical transition (the end of summer in the province) to emphasize temporality and the illusion of stability, a reflection on generational conflict and the speed of modern life.

Mauvais Sang

In a futuristic but decadent Paris, threatened by a lethal virus that affects those who have sex without love, two criminal gangs clash to steal the vaccine. Leos Carax directs a stylized and frenetic neo-noir.

Carax’s Paris is a cold, industrial, and nocturnal city, filmed with a breathtaking visual aesthetic that rejects naturalism. The setting is not picturesque, but dystopian and full of nervous energy. It is an example of cinema that uses the capital to construct a dark, modern mythology, far removed from typical romantic comedies.

Les Mistons

A short medium-length film by Truffaut observing a group of boys in Nîmes obsessed with the beauty of Bernadette and her fiancé, whom they stalk and bother during the summer.

Truffaut uses Nîmes, in the South of France, with a sunny, almost documentary-like light, to capture the raw energy of adolescence. The provincial summer setting, dominated by heat and boredom, amplifies nascent desire and childhood cruelty, making the province a place of acute observation of human psychology.

L’Inconnu du lac

During the summer, at an isolated lake in South-West France, a man, Franck, falls in love with Michel, a charming but dangerous man. The lake becomes the site of sexual encounters, suspense, and murder.

Alain Guiraudie exploits the harsh and solitary beauty of the lakeside as a free zone of sexuality and danger. The isolation of the location insolite amplifies the homoerotic tension and the sense of threat. The film, independent and radical in its explicit representation, shows France as a place where wild nature and human impulses meet without social filters.

III. Rural Cinema: The Land, Labor, and Deep France

Independent cinema has often delved into the life of Francia rurale, moving beyond the idyll to address social realism and the economic crisis of farmers. These works transform the farm and the fields into places of struggle, obsession, and resistance against urban bureaucracy.

Petit Paysan (Bloody Milk)

Pierre, a young dairy farmer in the Grand Est, has an almost visceral bond with his land and his animals. When a contagious disease threatens his livestock, and thus his very subsistence, Pierre takes desperate and illegal actions to hide the epidemic and save his family farm.

This film is a powerful contemporary rural drama. The setting on the farm in the Grand Est, where director Hubert Charuel grew up, ensures authentic realismo rurale. The narrative adopts the codes of the thriller, using the agricultural crisis not only as an economic backdrop but as a catalyst for intense psychological conflict. Pierre is a “singular hero,” whose obsession reflects the deep alienation of the farming world from incomprehensible urbanity and the bureaucratic system.

Sous le soleil de Satan

An adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ novel, Maurice Pialat’s film follows Donissan, a tormented abbot struggling with his faith and the perception of evil in a rural parish in Northern France.

Pialat, known for his uncompromising cinéma d’auteur, uses the harshness of the northern countryside (often regions like Picardy or areas of inland Normandy) to reflect the intensity of the spiritual drama. The austerity of the landscape and the modesty of the rural dwellings amplify the protagonist’s solitude and desolation, contrasting with any easy religious sentimentality.

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi)

Agnès Varda, a pivotal figure in independent cinema, follows the last months of Mona’s life, a young clochard whose body is found frozen in a ditch. The film is a semi-documentary reconstruction of her journey through rural Southern France.

Rural Provence and Languedoc are stripped of their tourist charm here. Varda uses these vast and desolate spaces to question the myth of nomadic freedom, showing instead the brutal indifference of society and the landscape towards marginality. Rural France becomes a place of physical resistance and social failure.

La Vie de Jésus

Bruno Dumont’s debut, set in his native Bailleul, Northern France. The film follows Freddy, an unemployed teenager with muscular dystrophy and his gang of friends, immersed in an existence of boredom and minor violence, leading up to a racially motivated murder.

Dumont uses Bailleul, an industrial and agricultural town on the Belgian border, as a backdrop to explore human nature and evil in a context of poverty of opportunity. The location insolite is filmed in a glacial and austere manner, reflecting the apathy and repressed violence of the northern province.

Un conte de Noël

The complex and dysfunctional Vuillard family reunites in Roubaix, Northern France, for Christmas, after the matriarch is diagnosed with a serious illness. Arnaud Desplechin’s film is an exploration of historical grudges and indissoluble bonds.

Roubaix, an industrial city in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, is an unusual setting for a high-bourgeois family drama. Desplechin avoids Parisian tropes, rooting the emotional crisis in a context of cold, almost depressing, provincial modernity, giving the film a tone of uncommon intense realismo sociale.

L’Enfance nue

Maurice Pialat’s first feature film, following François, a ten-year-old child placed in foster care with various families in a village in Northern France. The film portrays his difficult growth, his acts of cruelty, and his struggle to find a place in family and society.

Shot with an almost documentary style, the film uses the northern countryside (often Pas-de-Calais) to show a raw and unfiltered social reality. The daily life of the village and the absence of rhetoric make it a pillar of French cinéma d’auteur, where the rural environment is anything but romantic.

Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train

A vast array of relatives and friends gathers in Limoges to take a train to Lussac-les-Châteaux for the funeral of Jean-Baptiste, an eccentric artist. The journey and the reunion become a stage for exploring strained relationships and hidden truths.

Patrice Chéreau uses the Limousin province and the train journey (a non-place) to enclose a bourgeois drama. Lussac-les-Châteaux is a place of memory and pain, far from metropolitan distraction, forcing the characters to confront each other in the isolation of the countryside.

Jacquot de Nantes

Agnès Varda directs this tribute to her husband, Jacques Demy, reconstructing his childhood in Nantes in the 1940s. The film is a poetic biography exploring the first passions for cinema and theater in a context of war and modest life.

Nantes, a port city on the Loire Atlantique, is shown through the eyes of a child, not as a large metropolis, but as a place of artisan shops and nascent dreams. Varda captures the genius loci of Nantes, inextricably linking Demy’s artistic genesis to his provincial environment.

Journal d’un curé de campagne

Robert Bresson adapts Bernanos’ novel, narrating the spiritual and physical struggle of a young curate in the poor village of Ambricourt, Northern France. The curate records his difficulties with faith, illness, and the hostility of his parishioners in his diary.

The village of Ambricourt is the epitome of desolate Francia rurale. Bresson uses this environment for an austere and minimalist investigation into holiness and suffering. The simplicity and poverty of the rural settings are crucial to Bresson’s ascetic style, rejecting any form of external dramatization.

IV. Ports, Coasts, and Multicultural Cities: Other Visions of France

This section focuses on the places that define modern France, not through its monarchical history, but through its social complexities: the banlieues, port cities like Sète and Marseille, and the industrial regions of the North, places of immigration, cultural clash, and realismo sociale.

Bande de filles (Girlhood)

Marieme is a fifteen-year-old girl living in a difficult Parisian banlieue. To escape an oppressive family and limited prospects, she joins an all-female gang. The film follows her search for identity and freedom through solidarity and petty crime in the cités.

Céline Sciamma rejects central Paris to immerse herself in the banlieues, the popular neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital. These areas, often ignored or stigmatized by mainstream cinema, are filmed as spaces of intense vitality and resistance. The peripheral setting is essential for the realismo sociale of the work, providing an authentic stage for the complex dynamics of race and gender in contemporary France.

La Haine

After a young man from their community is brutally beaten by the police, three friends (Vinze, Said, Hubert) of different ethnic origins live 24 hours of tension in their cité on the outskirts of Paris.

Mathieu Kassovitz uses the banlieues (often associated with Magsasalam) as a political battlefield. Shot in raw black and white, the film captures the claustrophobic atmosphere and repressed anger of marginalized youth. The location insolite of these neighborhoods becomes the center of the debate on state violence and integration.

L’Humanité

Bruno Dumont sets this drama in Bailleul, Northern France, where police inspector Pharaon De Winter investigates the murder of a little girl. Pharaon, clumsy and hypersensitive, is more focused on his inner confusion and desire than on the investigation.

Bailleul, a small industrial town in the North, is rendered a glacial and spiritual place. The use of non-professional actors and the desolation of the industrial and agricultural landscape create an experimental cinema that investigates the human condition beyond conventional psychology. Dumont uses the anonymous periphery to set metaphysical questions.

Dheepan

Dheepan, a former Sri Lankan Tamil fighter, flees to France with a woman and a child, pretending to be a family, settling in a troubled cité on the outskirts of Paris to start a new life.

Jacques Audiard uses the banlieue as a violent microcosm where the traumas of civil war clash with urban petty crime. The location insolite, a popular residential complex, is a place of difficult reintegration, demonstrating that welcoming France often limits itself to relegating immigrants to peripheral ghettos, where the struggle for survival continues.

L’Esquive

Set in a cité on the outskirts of Paris, the film follows Abdelkrim, a teenager who falls in love with Lydie and tries to win her over by learning to recite a piece of Marivaux for a school play.

Abdellatif Kechiche, a master of realismo sociale, uses the banlieue as a vibrant and linguistic stage. The conflict between the classical language of French theater and the argot spoken by the neighborhood kids highlights the clash of classes and cultures within the urban context. The location insolite is crucial for the examination of youthful identity.

La Graine et le Mulet

In Sète, a port city in Southern France, Slimane, a North African immigrant in his sixties, dreams of opening a couscous restaurant aboard an abandoned fishing boat to secure a dignified future for his extended family.

Kechiche explores Marseille and Sète as centers of Mediterranean life and complex integration. The port city is not a holiday destination, but a hub of immigration and economic struggle. The film uses the coastal setting to showcase the realism of the North African community, its efforts, and its economic hopes in an often-indifferent France.

Vendredi Soir

During a transport strike in Paris, Laure agrees to give Jean a ride in a van. What begins as a casual encounter turns into an intense night of desire and sensual tension.

Claire Denis uses Paris, blocked by traffic and the strike, as a place of temporal suspension. The external urban chaos creates forced intimacy inside the vehicle. The city is perceived through the tension of bodies and the noise of the street, a sensorial approach that clearly distinguishes this auteur cinema from the conventional representation of Paris.

Chronique d’un été

Considered a foundational text of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin conduct a socio-ethnographic experiment in Paris in the summer of 1960. They question ordinary people about their happiness and way of life, offering an unmediated portrait of the post-war capital.

Paris here is a vast social laboratory. The documentary uses streets, markets, and workplaces to capture daily reality, challenging narrative fiction. It is a supreme example of cinema in its most radical documentary form, where the setting serves to reflect on society itself.

Low

A visual and sonic odyssey by Renaud Cojo, an experimental medium-length film that follows the hypnotic path of David Bowie’s shadow from Journal of Nathan Adler, accompanied by Philip Glass’s eponymous album.

Although abstract, the film is rooted in the French environment as an example of the continuous production of experimental cinema. The generic and non-specific setting (a no man’s land) is functional to its abstract nature, demonstrating that French underground cinema does not need recognizable settings to exist, but relies on sensory experience and the deconstruction of the landscape.

Les Statues meurent aussi

An essay medium-length film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, exploring the history and fate of African art in Western museums, focusing on the critique of colonialism and cultural commodification.

Much of the film is set in the museums of Paris, where decontextualized African art rests. The film uses the Parisian museum environment not to celebrate French culture, but to criticize its colonial past and the predatory nature of its artistic collection. It is a work of film criticism that transforms a place of cultural power into a place of accusation.

I. Paris Labyrinth (Continuation)

Le Genou de Claire

Jérôme, a diplomat about to marry, spends a holiday on Lake Annecy. Here, he develops an intellectual obsession with Claire, a young teenager, and particularly her knee. The film is a sophisticated moral comedy, typical of Éric Rohmer’s Moral Tales.

Although primarily set in Annecy (Haute-Savoie), the film is deeply rooted in the Parisian intellectualism of the characters. The tension between Jérôme’s cerebrality and the sensuality of the Alpine province defines the drama. The landscape of Lake Annecy, used as a place of philosophical reflection, is the perfect environment for Rohmer, who uses natural beauty to expose the pettiness and conventions of the bourgeoisie.

Cleo de 5 a 7

Cléo, a superficial pop singer, awaits the results of a medical test that could confirm she has cancer. In the two hours that pass between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM, she wanders the streets of Paris, confronting her mortality and the reality of the city.

Agnès Varda films Paris almost in real-time, transforming the Left Bank neighborhoods, cafés, and gardens into a stage for existential anguish. The city is not just a backdrop, but a relentless clock that marks Cléo’s crisis. Varda uses this production independence to offer a feminine and intimate vision of the metropolis.

À nos amours

Maurice Pialat explores the difficult adolescence of Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian girl who uses sex as a means to escape emotional discomfort and the disintegration of her family.

The film captures a suburban and domestic Paris, far from the iconic locations. Bourgeois apartments and transitional spaces become places of intense psychological conflict. Pialat imposes a brutal, uncompromising realismo sociale, using Parisian interiors to show the implosion of the family unit and communicative impotence.

Le Samouraï

Jef Costello, a methodical and solitary hitman, lives in a bare apartment and faces the consequences of a botched assignment in nocturnal Paris.

Jean-Pierre Melville distills Paris into a stylized, almost abstract environment. The city is reduced to night clubs, anonymous police stations, and silent streets, stripped of any cultural or sentimental reference. Melville’s Paris is a universe of concrete and trench coats, essential to his noir auteur cinema that merges American aesthetics with French existential solitude.

II. Satirical Borders (Continuation)

Le Secret de Gengis Cohn

A film by Maurice Vandevelde that satirically addresses the story of a man who discovers he is the reincarnation of a Jewish prisoner from World War II. The work is an example of independent cinema that plays with identity and historical memory.

The film, although less known, exploits the French province as a place where the past unexpectedly resurfaces. The rural province serves as a counterpoint to the historical oblivion of big cities, a place where collective memory is still palpable and the secrets of the past can influence the present.

L’Autre

Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic direct this psychological drama about the duality of identity. Anne-Marie, a married woman, discovers the existence of her near-lookalike, plunging her into a spiral of paranoia.

The setting shifts between bourgeois interiors and anonymous city streets, likely in the province, where the sense of isolation can amplify the protagonist’s anguish. The lack of a specific iconic location reinforces the theme of fluid identity and existential crisis, typical of contemporary auteur cinema.

Adieu Gary

Nassim Amaouche directs this film set in a small, defunct mining town, where a community of Algerian immigrants lives awaiting demolition. The film is a portrait of nostalgia and the failure of the migratory dream.

The location insolite, a ghost industrial town in Northern France, is crucial. Amaouche uses the backdrop of industrial decay to explore economic marginality and suspended identity. This film is an example of how the cinematic geography of independent cinema focuses on places forgotten by official France.

Un homme qui dort

An adaptation of Georges Perec, the film follows a young Parisian student who one day decides to stop acting, reacting, or participating in life, immersing himself in a state of total indifference and voluntary isolation, wandering through Paris.

The film uses anonymous Parisian neighborhoods as a backdrop for apathy. The city is explored through the protagonist’s passive gaze. The choice of visual filters and the detached narrative tone transform the Parisian streets into a purely mental space, demonstrating the experimental use of the capital as an existential void.

Nord

Xavier Beauvois’ debut film, set in Northern France, portraying the life of Bertrand, a young man who returns to live with his mother after military service, struggling against depression and the provincial narrow-mindedness.

The gray, cold environment of the North is central. The film fits into the realismo sociale thread that depicts the province not as picturesque, but as oppressive. Beauvois’ choice to focus on this difficult geographical landscape underscores the link between environmental and psychological depression, typical of auteur cinema exploring the challenging Francia rurale.

III. Rural Cinema (Continuation)

Le Cheval d’orgueil

Claude Chabrol directs this film based on the autobiography of Pierre Jakez Hélias, recounting childhood in a poor peasant family in Brittany in the 1910s, focusing on local culture and dialect.

Chabrol, usually associated with bourgeois dramas, immerses himself here in Breton realismo rurale. Brittany is shown with an ethnographic eye, valuing local culture and resistance to change. The setting is crucial for understanding identity and linguistic formation, far from the linguistic centrality of Paris.

Quand la mer monte…

Yolande Moreau plays Irène, a street artist who travels in Northern France to present her show. The film is a road movie that takes place between the coastal cities and villages of Hauts-de-France.

The northern coast, with its gray skies and windy littoral, is used to contrast the character’s vibrancy. The work exploits geographical marginality and itinerant life to explore themes of solitude and rebirth, typical of auteur cinema that follows outsider characters in unconventional environments.

La Dentellière

Claude Goretta directs this film about the shy Béatrice, who works as a hairdresser apprentice and falls in love with François. When he leaves her, Béatrice retreats into emotional silence, ending up in a clinic in Normandy.

The film begins in Paris, but its psychological climax occurs in the Norman countryside. The clinic and the rural landscape represent Béatrice’s isolation and fragility. Normandy here is not a picturesque place, but a region of retreat and silence, used to explore the consequences of urban emotional cruelty.

L’Été meurtrier

A sensual drama set in a Provençal village. The young Elle arrives in the village and ignites an obsession in the mechanic Pin-Pon, while she tries to discover the secret of her birth, linked to an old crime.

Although achieving some success, the film avoids the idealization of Provence, using the heat and beauty of the landscape to intensify the psychological drama and violence. The village, with its gossip and secrets, is a social trap where passions are amplified by the climate.

IV. Multicultural Cities (Continuation)

Un prophète

Malik, an illiterate young Arab, is sentenced to six years in prison in France. Inside, he is forced to join the Corsican gang and, through acts of violence and intelligence, climbs the criminal hierarchy.

Although it does not show wide views of urban France, the prison, often located on the outskirts of large cities like Marseille or Lyon, is a metonymy for French society itself. The film is an example of realismo sociale that uses the carceral institution to explore the dynamics of power, race, and failed integration, crucial for understanding French urban tensions.

Chocolat

Claire Denis’ debut film, set in colonial Cameroon, although the central theme is return and memory. The film is crucial for its approach to post-colonial critique.

Although the main action takes place in Africa, the narrative is framed by the memory of the protagonist, France, who revisits the places of her childhood in Cameroon. The perspective, that of a white woman returning to a place of colonial trauma, reflects the French obsession with its imperial past and its complex relationship with the immigrant communities now living in cities like Marseille and Lyon.

Le Silence de Lorna

The Dardenne brothers tell the story of Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Liège (Belgium) who tries to obtain Belgian citizenship through a fictitious marriage, but her ambitions lead her to a dark agreement.

The film, although set in Belgium, addresses themes of immigration, human trafficking, and fake marriages that are endemic in large French cities like Lyon and Marseille. The Dardennes, masters of European realismo sociale, reflect the migration issues that shape the French urban peripheries.

L’Intrus

Louis Trebor, an elderly and solitary man, lives on the French-Swiss border, seeking a new heart. Claire Denis intertwines his search with a journey to Asia and reflections on identity and the transparency of borders.

The film is structured around the French-Swiss border and the coastline of Southern France. France here is a place of transit and mystery, where geographical proximity to other nations amplifies the theme of fragmented identity. The film’s independence allows for an abstract and meditative narrative, linked to the physical concept of the border.

L’Événement

Audrey Diwan adapts Annie Ernaux’s novel, telling the story of Anne, a brilliant university student desperately seeking an illegal abortion in 1960s France, when abortion was still a crime.

The film is set in a university town (likely Rouen or a provincial city) and uses the university spaces and anonymous alleys to convey a sense of fear and isolation. 1960s provincial France is here a place of social and sexual oppression, where Anne’s personal struggle clashes with the country’s conservative morality.