Jacques Penot

Captain James Cook

Based on Captain James Cook's three voyages. It was on his first voyage, in 1770 (while in the South Pacific region to observe the transit of Venus), that Captain Cook discovered the east coast of Australia. He later recommended Australia as a future British colony. The series was financed by $5 million from Revcom France, $2.25 million from the ABC and the rest from 10BA tax money.

For Those I Loved

Polish Martin Gray recalls the Holocaust, New York prosperity, and losing his wife and family.

Champs-Elysées

Sarraounia

On 2 January 1899, starting from the French Sudan, a French column under the command of the captains Voulet and Chanoine is sent against the black Sultan Rabah in what is now the Cameroon. Those captains and their African mercenary troops destroy and kill everything they find on their path. The French authorities try to stop them sending orders and a second troop but the captains kill the emissaries who reach them. Sarraounia, queen of the Aznas, have heard about the exactions. Clever in war tactics and in witchcraft, she decides to resist and stop those mad men.

The Revolving Doors

A quiet painter, separated from his wife for a year, receives a suitcase in the mail from his mother, whom he hasn't seen since infancy. He believes she abandoned him to his wealthy, paternal grandparents. The suitcase contains mementos and a diary, a long letter to him, written over the years, with details of her youth, her first job as a pianist at a cinema, the coming of talkies, her marriage, and how he came to live with his grandparents. As he reads through the materials and her story comes to life, his son Antoine, who's about 10 or 12, tries to break through his father's silence and sorrow by taking matters into his own hands.

The Cry of the Owl

Robert is an architect and artist, in Vichy after separating from his Parisian wife. Robert finds it calms him to stand in the shadows of the home of Juliette and Patrick and watch her cook. She thinks he's a prowler and confronts him, then invites him in...

Strictement personnel

The crimes and tragedies that tear apart one family seem overblown in the telling, yet this psychological drama about the miseries of one French policeman is compelling throughout. Jean (Pierre Arditi) is a cop and also a failed novelist who was abandoned by his father, brother, and sister after his mother died. The trio move to Paris where they set up an art scam that nets them considerable cash -- something Jean begins to figure out when he joins them for a family reunion. Little by little, he learns that his father is an expert forger, his stepmother's art gallery seems to be involved in the scam, his brother is a derelict and into drugs, his stepmother is a hooker in addition to all of this, and his sister runs an exercise gym for keeping prostitutes in shape. Things get worse -- just when everything seems bad enough, the stepmother is murdered and it is up to Jean to find the killer.

Les Cordier, juge et flic

The Cordier fight in family against the crime: the father is police captain, the son, investigating judge and the girl, a journalist.

The Long Winter

In 1939, Ramón was a young man, caught up in his Barcelona family's involvement on the Republic side in the brutal Spanish Civil War. He and his family fled into exile ahead of Franco's troops. Now it is many years later, and he has come back to see how his old homestead fared in the intervening years. The only person he can find who is able to remember those years clearly is his family's old butler Claudio.

Derborence

Antoine leaves his new bride behind to go on a skiing excursion with his uncle up the mountain behind their village of Derborence. Nine weeks after an avalanche apparently buries them alive, Antoine returns home. Certain that his uncle has also survived, he resolves to go back up and look for him—leaving his now-pregnant wife behind once more.