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Such was her fame that on March 31, 1920, the Los Angeles Times devoted a banner headline across the top of its front page to the nuptials of ‘America’s sweetheart’ Mary Pickford to her paramour Douglas Fairbanks. “Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are Secretly Married Here,” it proclaimed.

Willem Dafoe spoke to the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press in 1988 about playing Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ directed by Martin Scorsese from the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. “It seems like the most logical thing to do would be to read the source material, but I didn’t, which is interesting, because I didn't want to burden myself with any expectations or be influenced by any images, so you try to free yourself from them as much as possible.

“Don't ask me to start fast and strong! I always start slow and then eventually catch up – all I did in my life is coming from behind and catching up!” That's what So Wa Wai yells in despair to his mother, when she pushes him to start faster in the 200-hundred-meter dash in the Honk Kong film Zero to Hero. Written and directed by Jimmy Wan, the film is based on the true story of Paralympic champion So Wa Wai, who raced for Hong Kong as a sprinter in five special Olympic games between 1996 and 2012.

Meet Manu and Jean-Gab, (played by the French comedy act David Marsais and Grégoire Ludig), two broke halfwit losers hanging out on the Côte d’Azur, ready for any opportunity to make some money. When they unexpectedly get an offer to earn €500 to transport a mysterious suitcase, the buddies steal an old Mercedes to get to their destination.

France de Meurs is a star reporter and anchor for a top news channel. In a way, she is a cross between Christiane Amanpour and Marie Colvin, only not as honest and not as tragic, at least at the beginning.

Filmed in Switzerland by French director Elie Grappe, who co-wrote the story with Raphaëlle Desplechin, Swiss entry Olga is Grappe’s full-length feature film directorial debut. This 85-minute movie is the story of a teenage Ukrainian gymnast en route to the Olympics who is forced to leave her native country because of political unrest.

The latest offering by filmmaker Artykpai Suyundukov, titled Shambala, is based on the 1970 novel, “The White Ship”, by Kyrgyz literary figure, Chingiz Aitmatov. The heartbreaking story chronicles the life of 8-year-old Shambala (Artur Amanaliev) who’s raised by his grandparents following the death of his mother and the absence of his father.

A couple of years ago, a call for teaching Arabic at French schools sparked a heated debate in France, with the right-wing critics warning that the Semitic language would expose the young French Arabs to extreme ideas and possibly terrorism. In her second feature, A Tale of Love and Desire, Tunisian writer-director Leyla Bouzid shows the world and her lead character, an 18-year-old French-Algerian university student named Ahmed, that Arabic is a sensual and erotic language.

In Margrete - Queen of the North we find ourselves in 1361, where a very young Margaret is witnessing the dead and wounded soldiers on the battlefield of Visby in Sweden. Cut to 1402 and Margrete has become Queen Margrete of Denmark and is negotiating with Norwegians and Swedes to create peace in the Nordic countries.

Recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, forty-something hairdresser Suze Trappet (Virginie Efira) decides to track down the son she abandoned when she was fifteen years old. While she is attending an appointment at a government agency where she faces the typical hurdles of French bureaucracy, a depressed IT security expert attempts to shoot himself in the office next door, missing the mark, and injuring instead the government clerk Suze is so unsuccessfully trying to deal with.