Guillaume Brac's L'Île au trésor | Treasure Island (1971)

'L'Île au trésor' obviously refers to Robert Louis Stevenson's book which appeals perhaps largely to younger people, and Brac also includes a quotation from the novel right at the beginning of this full-length documentary: '"I don't know about treasure," he said, "but I'll stake my wig there's fever here."' This is L'Île de loisirs at Cergy-Pontoise, where a large number of activities meet the gaze of the camera: a group of under-age kids trying to sneak in illegally; young women being chatted up; many water activities, some against the rules of the parc; a retired teacher staying in a five-star hotel and relating a story about a platonic relationship with two teenage girls; Afghan refugees talking about their experiences, etc. The young Guillaume Brac used to enjoy going to this place, as is obvious from the loving details he shows here.

Guillaume Brac's Le Repos des braves | Rest for the Braves (2016)

This is a documentary on La Route des Grandes Alpes by cycle enthusiast Guillaume Brac. At the end of June each year about sixty retired amateur cyclists journey across the Alpes from the north to the south, to the Mediterranean shores in Nice and Menton, where they relax for a day before returning home. The route starts at Thonon-les-bains by the Lac de Genève and runs for about seven hundred kilometers. The tour lasts for four days and accommodation is prepared for them to spend the night. Along the way (of the film itself) are clips of Bernard Thévenet during Le Tour de France of 1975, and the gruelling Liège-Bastogne-Liège cycle run in the snow in 1980.

At the end, when the cyclists take their bikes to pieces and take the coach back, one of them has half-written a song to his Philippe cycle to the tune of Les Charlots's 'Merci Patron', which the others sing the chorus to, and which is followed by Brassens singing 'Heureux qui comme Ulysse', a hymn to freedom, travel, and Provence.

Guillaume Brac's Un monde sans femmes | A World without Women (2012)

This medium-length film takes place in Ault on the north coast, where a young-looking Patricia (Laure Calamy) and her late teenaged daughter Juliette (Constance Rousseau) go for a week's summer holiday, where the painfully shy middle-aged Sylvain (Vincent Macaigne) hands them the key. This is a quiet village where everyone knows each other, although Sylvain seems lost without a partner. The women, of course, are the centre of attention as Sylvain joins them on the beach, shows them how to fish, but is himself like a fish out of water.

Sylvain's attempts to hit it off with Patricia obviously aren't working, as proven by his aggression to the gendarme Gilles (Laurent Papot) who's taken her outside the disco for a snog against the wall. He's just one of nature's losers: how could he miss out on the signification the time Patricia sucked her finger when referring to Bill Clinton, for instance? Patricia, though, is really not interested in Gilles, not really interested in any man or woman sexually, she's just disillusioned by the whole thing.

However – and in a kind of reprise of the end of Brac's À l'abordage – and the viewer could see this coming by about the middle of the film – when Juliette comes to say goodbye to Sylvain the night before she and her mother are leaving she asks for his email address, eats strawberries with him and spends the night with him. She explains that her mother always goes for wrong type, the pushy ones, and it's clear that Juliette is more mature than her mother in a number of ways: the fact that Patricia wants to do a stupid multiple choice game in a magazine while Juliette's studying a book for college is just one of them. Refreshing, and of course Rohmerian at the same time.

Guillaume Brac's À L’Abordage (2021)

Édouard (Édouard Sulpice) is a BlaBlaCar driver in his mother's car, and supposed to be picking up two women to drop off at Die (Drôme) before going to his mother's. But he's very surprised, in fact annoyed, when two guys appear (and very late at that): Félix (Éric Nantchouang), who's on his way, he believes, to give a pleasant surprise to a young woman he danced with and spent an innocent night with on the banks of the Seine, Alma (Asma Messaoudene), who took the train earlier in the day to Die, where her parents have a house they spend the summer in; and Félix's best friend Chérif (Salif Cissé).

Félix works as a homehelp to the elderly, and Chérif has rather clumsily taken a week's leave from his job in a small supermarket. The pair are very different from each other: Félix is black, hot-tempered, handsome, tall and slim, whereas Chérif (also black) is very calm, quite chubby, and a fair bit smaller – in fact, he's far removed from the neurotypical, as he seems to have an unusually large knowledge for someone of his poor education and job status, he prefers to read literary classics rather than his cellphone, and he avoids sports activities, saying he has otitis.

The three don't get on well at first. Félix makes fun of Édouard for his mother phoning him and calling him 'chaton' ('kitten'), and Édouard objects to him eating crisps in his mother's car. When they stop off at a motorway aire, Édouard shouts at them for talking amongst themselves and ignoring him, saying this isn't the etiquette of co-voiturage. He's even more annoyed when he's persuaded by Félix into having a look at the town before taking them to the campsite, and he reverses into a heavy object in a narrow street and makes it with difficulty to the campsite to afterwards learn at the garage that it will take 'une grosse semaine' ('at least a week') for parts to come for the wheel bearing to be fixed.

So Édouard is forced to sleep in the same tent as the snoring Chérif, although the two learn to relate to each other in the multi-lingual campsite also inhabited by the English and the strongly Francophile Dutch. And as Édouard and Chérif (who don't have partners at home) watch the mild loveplay of Félix and Alma in the river, Chérif concludes that they are both 'galériens' ('losers': the Americanised sub-titling translates this as 'washouts'!)

Although this modernised Rohmerian tale is essentially a light psychological study in diversity, showing how (often very different) people can come together, jump in and join (the title À L’Abordage isn't for nothing), it also highlights how arguments can come close to the surface, often caused indirectly by unrelated psychological trauma: examples of this are the fight during the canyoning episode, or Félix – who has just split up with Alma largely because his inappropriate, over-enthusiastic behaviour turns her off – suggests that Chérif is gay because he passes so much of his time with unavailable women. And this comment in turn has a knock-on effect with Chérif, who turns down the suggestion by Héléna (Ana Blagojevic) that he look after her baby Nina for two hours while she has a massage to relieve her tension.

Chérif's obviously disinterested attentions to Nina have been an example of his difference: while the others have played sports or love/sex games, he's spent much of his time as a casual babysitter, a substitute father as Héléna's partner – whom she only once mentions (and only as 'il') has been called away. Furthermore, this relationship between Chérif and Héléna is another example of the meeting of different classes, although they have a geographical similarity: Chérif comes from La Courneuve, Héléna grew up in adjoining Stains and they both remember the same supermarkets.

Towards the end there's a scene in which Chérif and Héléna, having left the rather weird staff member Nicolas (Nicolas Pietri) – who is now off duty with a sprained arm, is terrified of the end of the world, and whom Alma sees as a slit-your-throat pessimist – in charge of Nina while they go to the camp bar for a drink. They're met by Édouard, who invites Chérif to sing karaoke, but he's shyly very reluctant until everyone in the bar joins in chanting 'Chérif!' and Héléna encourages him to join her in singing: à l'abordage! Héléna chooses 'Aline', a 1965 summer hit by Christophe, which is appropriate because it's about sand, beach and lost love (although Félix is absent).

In the morning we find Chérif and Héléna staring lovingly at each other in bed naked, Édouard cleaning the shower block mirror as he's changed places with Nicolas and needs money for car repairs, and Félix being lulled awake by a young woman playing the guitar and singing: she turns out to the clown the trio saw amusing kids when they went on a visit to Die. A delightful film.