The best Catherine Hiegel’s movies

In France, terrorist groups and intelligence agencies battle in a merciless war everyday, in the name of radically opposed ideologies. Yet, terrorist and secret agents lead almost the same lives. Condemned to secrecy, these masters of manipulation follow the same methods. Alex and Al Barad are two of them. The former is the head of the D.G.S.E.'s (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French equivalent of the CIA or the MI6) counter-terrorism unit while the latter reigns over a terrorist network, and both fight using the most ruthless of weapons: human beings.

After learning of her husband's infidelities, a housewife invites an itinerant lesbian to move in with them. None of their lives will ever be the same again.

A father arrives at his son's house one evening. They begin talking about women, love, relationships and things turn awkward fast.

Two babies are switched at birth. When the mistake is discovered 12 years later, it leads to complications in the lives of both families. One family is affluent, with dutiful and (apparently) contented children. The other family is poor, with rambunctious (even delinquent) children, often hungry, but with lots of laughter in the house.

They’re all nuts. Her parents, who want to send her off to boarding school. Her new teacher, who expects her to read impossibly old books. Her fellow band members, who make her sing ridiculous lyrics and dress her up in a frilly white dress for their first show. Everyone seems to know what she should do and how she should act. And it’s not like 13-year-old Aurore has any fundamental problem with changing herself either. Who would want to be like this: unhappy, ugly and emotionally withdrawn? But the others don’t seem all that much happier to her either. She definitely doesn’t ever want to be as old, rundown and lonely as her mother. And so she prefers to stay the way she is, to observe and make her biting comments on whatever comes her way.

Simon Eskenazy is a gay Parisian clarinet player who lives his single life to the fullest. One day, he receives a very tempting offer from his homophobic uncle, looking to continue the family legacy – if he gets married and has a child, he will receive ten million francs and inherit his uncle's luxurious mansion. After meeting Rosalie Baumann at his cousin David's wedding, and with some convincing on his mother's part, Simon sees an opportunity to fulfill his uncle's wishes and the pair go ahead and get married, but not before traveling to New York to meet Rosalie's Orthodox Jewish family. As Simon tries to develop real feelings for Rosalie, he struggles with his feelings for his newlywed cousin David.

Born out of wedlock early in the last century, Violette Leduc meets Simone de Beauvoir in postwar Saint-Germain-des-Près. An intense lifelong relationship develops between the two women authors, based on Violette's quest for freedom through writing and on Simone's conviction that she holds in her hands the destiny of an extraordinary writer.

Molinat is assigned to the case of a man found with a bullet in his ear on the shore of a little Atlantic coast resort he knows well. Indeed, he used to live there before his wife disappeared at sea, never to be found again. As the ocean rejects a new corpse everyday, the mystery thickens and the list of potential suspects grows longer. This slows Molinat's progress as much as the cumbersome Leroyer, sent in to spy on him and hopefully impede his progress. The tension mounts and the ring involving the three young ladies in the grey mansion, the village idiot and the real estate agent starts spinning out of control.

He had opened his Great Restaurant twice, in 2010 and 2011, as part of an entertainment broadcast on France 2. Pierre Palmade “reopens it after work” in the form of a fiction offered by M6. Exit the brewery. The artist has chosen to shoot his film at the Froufrou, the restaurant at the Théâtre Édouard-VII, in Paris, a chic establishment with rococo decor, more solemn and therefore more appropriate to important moments in life, to his big announcements that make the subject of a series of sketches. They are interpreted by a cast of stars just as prestigious as that of his comrade Muriel Robin a few weeks ago in I Love you coiffure , on TF1. As a common thread, Pierre Palmade in the role of the host busy satisfying his customers, while ensuring that his mother (Marthe Villalonga), his competitor (Florence Foresti) and her cook husband (Jean Leduc) do not transform the evening in disaster.

Fred (Vincent Lindon) is a former crane driver who was a victim of the closure of his factory. He takes care of the little boy of his girlfriend (Clotilde Courau), does the housework and sometimes goes to the job center but boredom is inescapable. One day, because he accepted to drive a truck for a friend to a warehouse, he's caught up in a vicious spiral that goes beyond him. It's all the more serious as shady men want to eliminate him an the police is on his back.

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme satirizes attempts at social climbing and the bourgeois personality, poking fun both at the vulgar, pretentious middle-class and the vain, snobbish aristocracy. The title is meant as an oxymoron: in Molière's France, a "gentleman" was by definition nobly born, and thus there could be no such thing as a bourgeois gentleman.

A teenager, Ronald, unintentionally causes the death of a young girl on a beach. So that the police do not find him, his mother locks him in a cubicle, under the stairs of the house. On her death, the house was rented to an English family.

This bright domestic drama captures a moment in time when, for a large number of idealistic and grateful French men and women, the promise of Russian communism was bright, and everything Russian was a source of joy and amazement. In the story, Irene was rescued from Auschwitz by soldiers from the U.S.S.R., and since that time she has enthusiatically considered Russia to be the source of hope in the world. Her more pragmatic husband has, by 1958, grown somewhat weary of her enthusiasm, which has led her to decorate their apartment with anything Russian she can get her hands on. Matters come to a head when she is befriended by three members of the Red Army Choir during their tour of Paris.

A clarinetist is trying to finish his record when his wife and ten year old son reappear in his life. His 10-year-old son whom he has never seen, and Naim, a young Muslim transvestite who will change his life ...