Quarante is the portrait of a woman. Christel, soon to be 40 years old, is filmed by her companion. The movie goes through her stories, her experiments and her works as a director (a documentary about women, a japanese fiction feature with Fabienne Babe). As the movie progresses, it goes deeper into the intimacy of her life, her fantasies, and her relationship with her lover which gets more and more difficult. Quarante is a mix of interviews, stories, raw slices of raw life, impromptu meetings, fictions. It's about sexuality, cinema, and memories. Raw, surprising, exciting and often funny.

Quarante

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.