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!

Share
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...

  • Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)

    Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • Drama • With Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Justin Vivian Bond • 2006 • 101 minutes

    NSFW. Contains nudity and graphic depictions of sex.

    John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic an...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • A Teacher

    Directed by Hannah Fidell • Drama • With Lindsay Burdge, Will Brittain • 2012 • 76 minutes

    Part psychological thriller and part provocative character study, A TEACHER explores the unraveling of a young high school teacher, Diana (Lindsay Burdge), after she begins an affair with one of her teenag...

  • Metamorphoses

    Directed by Christophe Honoré • Drama • With Amira Akili, Sébastian Hirel, Mélodie Richard, Damien Chapelle, George Babluani
    • 2014 • 102 minutes

    When Europa skips class and meets a magnetic young man named Jupiter, she embarks on an unexpected and magical journey. Traveling on board Jupiter’s ...

  • Lolita (Adrian Lyne)

    Directed by Adrian Lyne • Drama • With Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella • 1997 • 137 minutes

    Humbert, a brilliant professor of French literature in New England, rents a room from a lonely widow, Charlotte, who falls in love with him. She is a giddy and talkative la...

  • The Days to Come

    Directed by Carlos Marqués-Marcet • Drama • With Maria Rodríguez Soto, David Verdaguer • 2019 • 102 minutes

    Vir and Lluis have been dating for just a year, when they find out they are "pregnant". During 9 months, we will follow the adventure of this young couple from Barcelona, the great truth i...

  • The Deep Blue Sea

    Directed by Terrence Davies • Drama • With Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston • 2012 • 98 minutes

    In The Deep Blue Sea, Master chronicler of post-War England, Terence Davies directs Rachel Weisz as a woman whose overpowering love threatens her well-being and alienates the men in her life. In a deeply ...

  • The Lover

    Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud • Drama • With Tony Leung, Jane March, Melvil Poulpaud, Jeanne Moreau • 1992 • 112 minutes

    Set in 1920s colonial Indochina, a pretty, virginal French teenager (Jane March) meets a handsome Chinese playboy (Tony Leung Ka Fai) from a respectable family. Going agains...

  • Special Treatment

    Directed by Jeanne Labrune • Drama • With Isabelle Huppert, Bouli Lanners, Richard Debusne, Sabla Moussadek, Valerie Dreville • 2010 • 95 minutes

    In this darkly erotic drama from cult filmmaker Jeanne Labrune, Isabelle Huppert (8 Women, Merci Pour le Chocolat, La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher, La...

  • La Petite Lili

    Directed by Claude Miller • Drama • With Ludivine Sagnier, Nicole Garcia, Bernard Giraudeau, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Robinson Stévenin, Julie Depardieu, Yves Jacques, Michel Piccoli. • 2003 • 100 minutes

    Ludivine Sagnier stars as Lili, the love and muse of an idealistic young filmmaker in this mod...