French Men is an inventory of life's many situations and dilemmas. As its title in French suggests, the film's ambition is to capture no less than the elusive thing of which a man's spirit is made, across an impressive span of emotions, revealed through glimpses of life.

Alex, Antoine, Jeff and Manu have been friends for 25 years, since playing for the same football team in the Paris suburbs. They see each other regularly, talking, arguing and laughing together.

One spring, they are struck by a series of major events, which bring them even closer together. Confronted by situations out of their control, they share personal secrets, listen, support, fight and question themselves and each other.

Director Marc Esposito's impressive debut feature concerns the lives of four friends, typical middle-aged Parisians, over a few short months. Their connivance is satisfying and often jubilant, with a multi-layered narrative that echoes Agnes Jaoui's delightful The taste of others.

Why is it a dream of so many people to become famous? What would it be like to be famous? What do we admire in famous people and why? These are some of the questions that provide the basis of screenwriter François Favrat's first feature film as a director.

Claire Rocher, a freelance journalist working at a fashion magazine, meets Elisabeth Becker, a film star. They have nothing in common. Their personalities and their relationships with men are completely different, not to mention the differences between their respective incomes and the issue of celebrity. Elisabeth hires Claire to be her personal assistant, and her life suddenly begins spinning on its axis. Little by little the two women become friends. Or so Claire thinks...

The movie has been awarded for Best Screenplay at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2004.

Office work and its horrors have increasingly become a central theme of recent French cinema, notably in films by Philippe Harel (the Houellebecq adaptation Whatever) and Laurent Cantet (Human Resources). Jean-Marc Moutout's film offers further insight into the world of ambitious young execs on the make, on the loose and on the fast track to moral perdition.

Jérémie Rénier (The Child, La Promesse) plays a young trainee newly signed up with a high-powered Parisian consulting firm, and placed under the tutelage of a company hotshot (Laurent Lucas), who walks the walk, talks the talk and brooks no argument.

Sent to the provinces to oversee the audit of a metal company, he soon realises his task is to prepare the way for redundancies all round, and feels the pull of a less compromised life with his single-mother girlfriend back in Paris. But things aren't that easy.

This film was nominated for the Golden Leopard at the 2003 Locarno International Film and it was nominated Best First Work and Most Promising Actor at the César Awards 2005.

Tunisian born but French raised actor-turned director Abdellatif Kechiche made a splash on the international festival circuit with his award-winning debut film about the French immigrant experience, Poetical Refugee.

His second film, shot on location in the Paris suburbs using non-professional actors, shares a similar intent to find new ways of looking at life in modern France. It has been awarded for Best Director, Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Most Promising Actress at the César Awards 2005.

15-year-old Krimo is bored with life on his run down estate, until he catches sight of a classmate, Lydia, rehearsing her lines for a school play. The production, of Marivaux's love story A Game of Love of Chance, gives Krimo an unlikely idea for how to woo this angelic looking girl.

Kechiche shoots in dynamic, close up fashion and makes the most of his energetic young cast, whose quickfire slang is no less poetic or rhythmic than Marivaux's text. As Krimo struggles to make his feelings known, we realise that L'Esquive, with its untranslatable title, is all about finding the right words.