Marie-Claude Treilhou's elusive and long-overlooked debut unfolds across a single Paris night.

Simone works as an usherette in a shabby Montparnasse porn cinema, sharing cigarettes, stories and mutual exasperation with her colleague while a procession of awkward regulars, night owls and lonely characters drift through the foyer. When her shift ends, the film follows her into the city's queer nightlife and finally onto an unexpected journey home with a stranger.

Both funny and quietly radical, Simone Barbès or Virtue captures a side of Paris rarely seen on screen: not the city of romance but of workers, misfits, conversations overheard late at night and fleeting encounters that only seem possible after dark. Produced within Paul Vecchiali's fiercely independent Diagonale collective, the film slips effortlessly between documentary observation and fiction, tenderness and irony.

Newly restored and increasingly recognised as a key work of post-New Wave French cinema, it retains the thrill of discovering a hidden classic. A vibrant, razor-sharp chronicle of female solidarity