La Chinoise

La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire (lit. 'The Chinese, or, Rather, in the Chinese Manner: A Film in the Making'), commonly referred to simply as La Chinoise, (French pronunciation: [la ʃinwaz]) is a 1967 French political docufiction film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard about a group of young Maoist activists in Paris. La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons (also known as The Possessed). In the novel, five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students—three young men and two young women—belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named after the novel Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan). The film won the Grand Jury Prize in 1967 Venice Film Festival. The film juxtaposes portraits of socialist revolutionaries with popular comic book heroes and imagery.