Life is a Very Strange Thing

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Australian filmmakers, Les McLaren and Annie Stiven, arrange to meet an old friend in Paris.

They had first met Frédéric when he had been a young rebel, and an ethnomusicologist in Papua New Guinea. They had then lost contact but in the intervening years, Frédéric had become the executive of a multinational garbage business. After decades abroad he'd returned to a France that is on edge with terror attacks, and shaken by the rise of nationalist politics.

Frédéric is a wily raconteur and collector, and his daily encounters with local characters in Paris and Bordeaux reveal a rich mosaic of life in France today.

We learn about Frédéric's grandfather who had been a colonial governor in Cambodia; and we meet his composer father, Charles Duvelle, whose recordings of traditional African music had helped to found the World Music movement. We also meet Frédéric's niece Elvire, a Femen activist who protests against social injustice and the Far Right.

The film is part road trip, part meditation – a wry and affectionate portrait from an outsider's perspective, with questions of what it is to be French in the twenty-first century.

Classification: PG

Running time: 80 mins