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Jérémy Clapin’s French-language Meanwhile On Earth is a heady dose of minimalist science fiction. No laser beams, no interstellar wars. It’s in the same camp as Coherence or The Vast of Night, earthbound thrillers that underexpose sci-fi elements. Clapin translates the alienation of grief into an alien encounter rooted in emotional importance over extraterrestrial engagement. Meanwhile On Earth dances between genre disinterest and grounded storytelling, seeking forgiveness through soulful themes that confront psychological unknowns with an ungraspable sense of ambiguity.

Megan Northam stars as Elsa ​​Martens, the sister to missing astronaut Franck Martens (Sébastien Pouderoux in voice only). Elsa hears Franck speaking in her mind, and then another voice intrudes. A disembodied entity requests Elsa provide five individuals to be inhabited by invisible cosmic beings, and in return, they’ll release Franck. Nobody else can hear the voices, leaving Elsa to question whether Franck might return home after nearly three years.

Animator/director Jérémy Clapin (the Oscar-nominated “I Lost My Body”) makes his live-action feature debut with the French sci-fi drama “Meanwhile on Earth.” It concerns Elsa (Megan Northam), the grieving sister of an astronaut lost in space, Franck (Sébastien Pouderoux), who’s unable to move on with her life. But she receives a ray of hope when an alien contacts her with a dark proposal for her brother’s safe return.

For Clapin, “Meanwhile on Earth” was an opportunity to explore his fascination with outer space via the theme of loss. Live-action provided a new means of expressing his surreal sensibility. Elsa’s painful journey is depicted as both reality and imagination. She works in a hospice, drawing pictures of the patients as an aspiring graphic novelist, but retreats inside her head, where her brother is still with her. For this, the director incorporated black-and-white animated sequences in which Elsa...

Writer/Director Jérémy Clapin, whose 2019 animated debut, I Lost My Body, earned an Academy Award nomination, makes the jump to live-action with the sci-fi thriller Meanwhile on Earth. Today, we have an exclusive clip that sets up violent psychological horror.

Metrograph Pictures releases Meanwhile on Earth in theaters on November 8, 2024.

In the film, “Elsa, along with her family, is struggling following the disappearance of her brother Franck, an astronaut who vanished during his first mission. While stargazing one night, Elsa is shocked to receive contact from Franck, but her joy is short-lived when she learns of the dark and troubling forces behind Franck’s reappearance, forcing her to confront the lengths she will go for the brother she once feared was gone forever.”

Sébastien Pouderoux, Catherine Salée, and Dimitri Doré also star.

Watch the clip below, which unleashes a violent chainsaw confrontation in the woods. Or does it? Things are...

In writer-director Jérémy Clapin’s downbeat science-fiction film Meanwhile on Earth, the promises of the future are already the naïve and tarnished daydreams of the past, while the present is a matter of inexorable decline. Lit in wintry tones of disillusionment, nearly every shot in Clapin’s follow-up to I Lost My Body evokes a kind of post-Futurist mood. At the same time, there are flashes of nostalgia for what we thought the present could be—if only we had believed in those daydreams hard enough for them to become reality.

The film tells the story of Elsa (Megan Northam), a young woman whose brother, Franck (voiced by Sébastien Pouderoux), has disappeared into the vacuum of outer space on an exploration mission. Her talent as an illustrator motivates Meanwhile on Earth’s several animated daydreams, in which she meets with Franck on a spacecraft that suggests something out of a Mœbius comic.

"Why is Rachel always here? I want her to leave." Music Box Films has finally revealed the full US trailer for an acclaimed French film titled Other People's Children, which most recently stopped by the 2023 Sundance Film Festival a few months ago. It first premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival last fall, and also played at TIFF before opening in France last September. Rachel is a happy, 40-ish-year-old teacher who loves her life, her friends, her job, and even her exes. She is exploring the idea of having a child but is not desperate to have one. Intrigued, ambivalent about it at times — an authentic example of the conundrum many women around her age face. Everything changes when she meets a new man with a wonderful 4-year-old daughter. Virginie Efira stars as Rachel, along with Roschdy Zem, Chiara Mastroianni, Callie Ferreira-Goncalves, Yamée Couture, Henri-Noël Tabary, Victor Lefebvre, as well as Sébastien Pouderoux.

The long-awaited, graphically rich, 2D watercolor-style animation “The Swallows Of Kabul” from French helmers Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec provides an involving adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s elegant literary fiction. The book, an international bestseller about life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital, highlighted a dangerous act of humanity during a grim and violent time via the stories of two couples whose fates become intertwined through death, imprisonment, and remarkable self-sacrifice. This supplies the core plot of the film, with the action condensed into a tight 81 minutes. Purists may object that the prestige production takes some liberties with novel, but on the whole, the inventions by screenplay writers Sébastien Tavel, Patricia Mortagne, and co-helmer Breitman feel dramatically and poetically right.

The action unfolds in 1998 (as opposed to the novel’s 2001), shortly after the fundamentalist Taliban have come to power. Historian Mohsen (voiced by Swann Arlaud) and artist Zunaira (Zita Hanrot...