The Secret of The Grain

The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.

At the port of Sète, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. He is a divorced father who forces himself to stay close to his family despite the schisms and tensions that are easily sparked off and that financial difficulties make even more intense. He is going through a delicate period in his life and, recently, everything seems to make him feel useless: a failure. He wants to escape from it all and set up his own restaurant. However, it appears to be an unreachable dream given his meager, irregular salary that is not anywhere near enough to supply what he needs to realize his ambition. But he can still dream and talk about it with his family in particular. A family that gradually gives its support to this project, which comes to symbolize the means to a better life. Thanks to its ingeniousness and hard work, this dream soon becomes a reality…or almost….

At the port of Sete, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. He is a divorced father who forces himself to stay close to his family despite the schisms and tensions that are easily sparked off and that financial difficulties make even more intense…

The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.

For generations, Monopoly has been America's favorite board game, a love letter to unbridled capitalism and—for better or worse—the impulses that make our free-market society tick. But behind the myth of the game's creation is an untold tale of theft, obsession and corporate double-dealing. Contrary to the folksy legend spread by Parker Brothers, Monopoly's secret history is a surprising saga that features a radical feminist, a community of Quakers in Atlantic City, America's greatest game company, and an unemployed Depression-era engineer.

In 1845, maverick sea captain Sir John Franklin set off with 128 men on Royal Navy ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to chart the elusive Northwest Passage. Venturing into uncharted Arctic waters, they were sailing off the map of the known world. Their state-of-the-art mission was equipped to survive for up to three years, but they were never heard from again. A century and a half of searching revealed only scant and tantalising clues, suggesting a descent into madness, starvation and even cannibalism. But no trace of the ships was found, until, 170 years later, a multi-million-dollar state-of-the-art expedition astonishingly found HMS Erebus, intact and upright on the Arctic sea floor.

Peter Taylor reveals the extraordinary story of how a former undercover MI5 officer put his life and career on the line to encourage the IRA to end its violent campaign and embrace politics. The former MI5 officer, simply known as Robert, ran the top-secret back channel of communications between the UK government and the leadership of the IRA. What Robert did has been a closely guarded secret for three decades and was the key link in the chain that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

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Danish director Mads Brügger and Swedish private investigator Göran Björkdahl are trying to solve the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjöld. As their investigation closes in, they discover a crime far worse than the murder of the secretary-general of the United Nations.