Romance

Romance

If your love for love films can sometimes fade, for want of something fresh or a deeper insight, OVID can promise you original, distinctive returns to beauty, passion, the forbidden, mad misunderstandings, and stolen intimacies.

From Jaqueline’s Audry’s great (and recently rediscovered and restored) 1950 French boarding school drama OLIVIA, to Deny Arcand’s 1986 Academy-Award nominated hit THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, up to the high school rom-com LOL (Laughing Out Loud), starring Sophie Marceau, and including the worlds of surrogacy, prostitution, LBGTQ lives, and many others, here’s to love, in all its forms!

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Romance
  • Will You Marry Us?

    Directed by Micha Lewinsky • Drama • With Marie Leuenberger, Dominique Jann • 2009 • 90 minutes

    Rahel Hubli is employed as a civil registrar. She hasn’t believed in the so-called “love of her life” in ages. But when a childhood friend, Ben, suddenly turns up, Rahel recalls again what it felt lik...

  • Martin Roumagnac

    Directed by Georges Lacombe • Drama • With Marlene Dietrich, Jean Gabin • 1946 • 108 minutes

    This tragic postwar romance is a tale of class anxiety and classic Romantic fatalism, run through with a typically French frankness about sex and gender. Jean Gabin is the titular character, an unpretent...

  • Fidelio

    Directed by Lucie Borleteau • Drama • With Ariane Labed, Melvil Poupaud, Anders Danielsen Lie, Pascal Tagnati, Jean-Lous Coulloc'h • 2014 • 97 minutes

    Thirty-year-old Alice is a sailor about to embark on a journey she will not soon forget. Leaving her fiancé Félix ashore, she joins the crew of a...

  • Sex & Lucía

    Directed by Julio Medem • Drama • With Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Javier Cámara • 2004 • 122 minutes

    Lucía is a young waitress in Madrid, who seeks refuge on a quiet, secluded Mediterranean island after the loss of her longtime boyfriend. Amidst the fresh air, dazzling sun, and glistening deep blu...

  • 4 Days in France

    Directed by Jérôme Reybaud • Drama • 2017 • 137 minutes

    Jérôme Reybaud’s remarkably accomplished feature debut is a sly and sophisticated take on gay romance in the 21st century. On a seemingly ordinary night in Paris, Pierre takes one last look his lover Paul’s sleeping body, then steals away i...

  • Swept Away

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller • Drama • With Mariangela Melato, Giancarlo Giannini • 1974 • 115 minutes

    NEW RESTORATION! Set against the backdrop of the beautiful Mediterranean, Swept Away is Lina Wertmuller's most famous and controversial film about sex, love and politics. On an elegant yacht cr...

  • Love the One You Love

    Directed by Jenna Bass • Drama • With Chi Mhende, Andile Nebulane, Louw Venter • 2015 • 88 minutes

    Across the city of Cape Town, a sex-line operator, a dog handler, a love-sick IT-technician and a lonely teenager begin to suspect that their romantic relationships are the subject of a bizarre co...

  • Beloved Sisters

    Directed by Dominik Graf • Drama • With Hannah Herzsprung, Florian Stetter, Henriette Confurius • 2015 • 170 minutes

    Beloved Sisters depicts the unconventional romance between two aristocratic sisters and a rebellious poet who took the European literary world by storm in the late eighteenth cent...

  • A Tale of Love and Desire

    Directed by Leila Bouzid • Drama • 2022 • 103 minutes

    Ahmed (Sami Outalbali), French of Algerian origin, grew up in the suburbs of Paris. At the university, he meets Farah (Zbeida Belhajamor), a young Tunisian woman, full of energy, who has just arrived in Paris. While discovering a corpus of se...

  • Perfumes

    Directed by Grégory Magne • Drama • With Emmanuelle Devos, Grégory Montel • 2021 • 100 minutes

    Anne Walberg is a wildly successful master of perfumes. She has an incredible gift for creating fragrances, but is temperamental and a perfectionist. Guillaume, her new chauffeur, desperately needs the...

  • Alice

    Directed by Josephine Mackerras • Drama • With Emilie Piponnier, Martin Swabey, Chloé Boreham • 2019 • 103 minutes

    Alice (Emilie Piponnier) is the perfect wife and mother, living happily with her husband Francois and their son in an apartment in Paris. When her credit cards are declined one day ...

  • Jealousy

    Directed by Philippe Garrel • Drama • With Louis Garrel, Anne Mouglalis, Rebecca Convenant, Olga Milshtein, Esther Garrel • 2013 • 76 minutes

    One of the major French filmmakers of the post-New Wave, Philippe Garrel has belatedly been recognized as a master in America, and JEALOUSY may be his mos...

  • Elles

    Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska • Drama • With Juliette Binoche, Anaïs Demoustier, Joanna Kulig • 2011 • 99 minutes

    A provocative and raw exploration of female sexuality, director Malgoska Szumowska's ELLES paints an unromantic picture of upper-crust domesticity refracted through the vibrant e...

  • O Amor Natural

    Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2007 • 76 minutes

    O AMOR NATURAL is a documentary film about the erotic poetry of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the 20th century, the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987).

    The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a hou...

  • Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

    Directed by Lili Horvát • Drama • With Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodó • 2021 • 94 minutes

    After 20 years in the United States, a Hungarian neurosurgeon returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor she met at a conference. When the love of her life is nowhere to be seen, she trac...

  • Beauty in Trouble

    Directed by Jan Hrebejk • Drama • With Anna Geislerová, Josef Abrhám, Jana Brejchová • 2006 • 110 minutes

    Beauty in Trouble explores a young woman’s romantic dilemma: torn between a primal connection and the need to provide for her children, she loves two men. Set against the back drop of the ...

  • The Seduction of Mimi

    Directed by Lina Wertmüller • Drama • With Mariangela Melato, Agostina Belli, Giancarlo Giannini • 1972 • 112 minutes

    THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI is a raucous sex comedy that brought international fame to director Lina Wertmuller (Swept Away).

    Giancarlo Giannini (Love and Anarchy) gives a wonderfull...

  • Egg and Stone

    Directed by Huang Ji • Drama • With Xiao Pin-gao, Liu Xiao-lin, Yao Hong-gui, Yixiang Huang, Baiyu Yao • 2016 • 98 minutes

    Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, EGG AND STONE is a powerful au...

  • The Salt of Tears

    Directed by Philippe Garrel • Drama • With Logann Antuofermo, Oulaya Amamra, André Wilms • 2020 • 101 minutes

    Veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel once again fashions a pinpoint-precise and economical study of young love and its prevarications, which ever so gradually blossoms into an emotionally r...

  • Rebels of the Neon God

    Directed by Tsai Ming-liang • Drama • With Lee Kang-sheng • 1992 • 106 minutes

    Tsai Ming-liang emerged on the world cinema scene in 1992 with his groundbreaking first feature, Rebels of the Neon God. His debut already includes a handful of elements familiar to fans of subsequent work: a deceptiv...

  • The Owl's Legacy: Misogyny, or the Snares of Desire

    Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

    “Greek love, Greek eroticism, is a paradigm for us. But it’s something about which we are very hypocritical.” --John Winkler

    Classicist Giulia Sissa takes center stage in this episode, which explores desire in ancient Greece (primarily ...

  • The Maids

    Directed by Christopher Miles • Drama • With Vivien Merchant , Susannah York , Glenda Jackson • 1975 • 94 minutes

    Jean Genet, one of the most celebrated creative minds of the 20th century, receives an unbridled, expertly cinematic rendering in this long unseen film based on his perverse play. Th...

  • August at Akiko's

    Directed by Christopher Makoto Yogi • Drama • With Alex Zhang Hungtai, Akiko Masuda • 2019 • 75 minutes

    Armed with just his suitcase and a sax, cosmopolitan musician Alex Zhang Hungtai (from the band Dirty Beaches) returns home to the Big Island of Hawaii having been away for nearly a decade. Hu...

  • DannyBoy

    Directed by Ferdia Mac Anna • Comedy • With Darragh Byrne, Clelia Murphy • 2021 • 97 minutes

    Set in small town Ireland in 1981, 'Dannyboy' tells the story of a young man trying to find love among New Romantics, Post Punks, Goths and other tribes. The film centers around Daniel, an anxious, stutt...