Vive le cinema!

This year's Cinepanorama celebrates life and cinema as portrayed on film

Featuring 23 films, the 36th French Cinepanorama (December 7-16) focuses on the human passions for life and cinema. Here are our hot picks:

To Each His Own Cinema

The film is an ode to cinema produced by 32 distinguished filmmakers, including Wong Kar-Wai, Takeshi Kitano and Roman Polanski, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Festival. Each director produced a three-minute short reflecting their views on the world's most popular art form. A must-see for movie buffs.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

A faithful adaptation of the 1997 memoir by Dominique Bauby, a French journalist who awoke one day to find himself mute and almost entirely paralysed due to a massive stroke. He communicated by blinking one eyelid, and so wrote his book. He passed away two days after it was published.

The movie, directed by Julian Schnabel, is a celebration of human will and imagination.

Flight of the Red Balloon

This is the first western film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the flag-bearer of Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. Juliette Binoche plays a mother torn between work and her two children.

She hires Song, a Taiwanese student studying at Paris University, to babysit. Song bonds with the children as she enters their imaginary world.

Twice Upon a Time

A romantic comedy about a 1970s film director, Louis Ruinard, and his favourite actress Alice d'Abanville. The pair separated when d'Abanville gives up her blossoming film career and marries a British aristocrat.

They reunite 30 years later when Ruinard arrives in London to receive a Lifetime Achievement award which d'Abanville is presenting.

Antoine De Caunes directs.

Boxes

The directorial debut of veteran actress Jane Birkin is a bittersweet story about love and the passage of time.

Birkin plays a middle-aged mother who finds boxes filled with mementos that remind her of her personal and family history. Also stars Geraldine Chaplin as her headstrong mother.

Little Senegal

The film follows a man who gives tours of the Senegal coastline from which his ancestors were captured and shipped across the Atlantic for the slave trade.

Determined to track their path, he travels to the southern United States, wandering from one plantation to write his family tree.

Rachid Bouchareb directs.

For more information, visit www.alliancefrancaise.com.hk