Le Paradis

North American Premiere

French director Alain Cavalier, now 83, may be best known for his fiction features (Thérèse, Le Combat dans l’île), but many of his recent—and best—movies have been deceptively modest, off-the-cuff personal essay-films. Voted one of the 10 best films of 2014 by Cahiers du Cinéma, Le Paradis, which Cavalier shot on digital video in his home, is a series of domestic sketches carefully arranged into a subtle, serene, and deeply touching meditation on how it feels to approach life’s end. The death and burial of a fledgling peacock, the carving of a watermelon, the buying and eating of a herring: one of Cavalier’s great gifts is his ability to translate broad abstractions into the concrete and the familiar. “God and I have separated,” he murmurs into the camera at one point, “but we run into each other again from time to time.”