Festival of Films in French

 

Love and rebellion are in the air at this year’s festival! We start off by celebrating Valentine’s Day with two powerful love stories Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Olivia. Lovers of cinema will continue to be transported through time and across the francophone world as other indomitable spirits seek to make their dreams come true. In Zombi Child, the story alternates between contemporary Paris and earlier periods in Haiti and, in Yao, we travel to urban and rural Senegal. Set deep in the woods of Québec, Il pleuvait des oiseaux shows us the possibility of love at any age in the most trying of circumstances. A politically weary Israeli (Synonymes), and a Moroccan chef (Tazzeka) set their sights on Paris as a lifeline in contrast to a graphic designer who leaves the capital to pursue environmentally sound farming in Normandy in the documentary A Modern Shepherdess. Two more documentaries feature testimonies: we meet witnesses of the anti-colonial revolt in Fahavalo, Madagascar 1947 (presented by the filmmaker in person) and Ziva Postec recounts the six years she devoted to editing the Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking film on the Holocaust. Our silent film evening offers two earlier examples of revolutionary techniques in film editing (La cigarette and Emak-Bakia). The challenges of modern love in the 1960s and 1970s are explored in Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur and Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus. Finally, in an earlier classic film Jeux interdits and the stop-motion comedy drama Ma vie de courgette, brave orphans offer us inspiring models for confronting hardship and finding our place in the world. Please visit our website for showtimes.