The Storytellers: Top 5 French Documentaries

Don’t Look Down

Man on Wire (2008), James Marsh

Purists or pedants may resent the inclusion in this list of a film that is not, strictly speaking, French, but James Marsh’s gripping, dizzying 2008 tale of high-wire walker Philippe Petit, is so shot through with Gallic bravura and charm, both in the language and Petit’s irresistible personality, that it merits a spot. Petit, a street performer and magician, called his 1974 harness-free traversing of the Twin Towers in New York – a sneaky case of derring-do and authority-snubbing presented here like a heist – ‘le coup’. He illegally crossed the wire suspended across the towers no less than eight times and it’s the story of that day that won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2008. It is the second most positively reviewed film ever on Rotten Tomatoes, a good barometer for any movie’s enduring power to please.

Presenting the Past

Le Chagrin et La Pitié (1969), The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophüls

The second in our selection to involve assembled archive footage expertly combined with testimonies (in this case, the director is also the off-screen interviewer), this four-hour, two-part documentary was made for French television and stands up as a riveting account of the French occupation by the Nazi regime during World War Two, often recalled by those involved politically. So there’s extended probing of Pierre Mendès-France, jailed by the Vichy government on charges of desertion, who then escaped to join de Gaulle’s cause out of England. There are also accounts from everyday people with their own memories of the four-year takeover. The long running time makes it sound like a marathon of gloom, but the rich texture and expert pacing brings the country’s experience of collaboration, compromise and latterly, resistance, powerfully to life.