by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewlseaders.com
Six award-winning French movies will be screened in a film festival that will run from Oct. 4 to Nov. 8 on the campuses of the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University.
Everybody is welcome to attend the movies, and even though they are in the French language, they are subtitled in English.
The movie series, the Tournees Film Festival, is made possible partly through the U.S. French Embassy’s cultural-services programming. Its aim is to bring the finest examples of French cinema each year to colleges and universities – and to the general public – throughout the United States. Also contributing to the annual festival are the Centre National du Cinema et de I’mage Animee, the French American Cultural Fund, the Florence Gould Foundation and Highbrow Entertainment.
“The Tournees Film Festival is open to everyone, and we really aim to get as many people here as possible, even those who have never spoken or heard a word of French,” said Dr. Ana Conboy, assistant professor of French at CSB/SJU. “It’s an opportunity to be exposed to other cultures and lives and a great way to be engaged in the community.”
The following is a list of the movies along with their show times and dates:
7:15 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, Room 102 of the SJU Art Building. Noire de . . . (The black girl from . . .) The English-language version of the movie is entitled Black Girl. Released in 1966, this French-Senegalese production was created by writer/director Qusmane Sembene. Starring Mbissine Therese Diop as “Diouana,” an acclaimed performance, the film is about a young woman in Senegal, Africa who moves to southern France to work as a nanny for a rich French couple. Disillusionment sets in quickly, followed by despair, when Diouana’s employers turn increasingly rude and demanding, expecting her to be a virtual slave, which leads to a shattering ending.
7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 10 in Room 204 of the CSB Gorecki Center. Fatima. Directed by Philippe Faucon and released in 2015, this movie won the French equivalent of the Oscar for Best Picture, as well as many other awards. It stars Soria Zeroual as Fatima, a divorced North African Muslim mother who is working in France as a housecleaner to support her two teenage daughters. Cultural clashes ensue, especially between the mother and one of the daughters.
7:15 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20 in the SJU Little Theater (Quad 346). Avril et le monde truque. The English-language version is entitled April and the Extraordinary World. This 2015 movie, a French-Belgian-Canadian production, is an animated science-fiction story that takes place in 1870 in France when a series of disasters leads to a polluted world that is virtually uninhabitable. The complicated plot involves the kidnapping of famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, and other bizarre – at times whimsical – developments.
7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24 in Room 204 of the CSB Gorecki Center. Dernieres nouvelles du cosmos. Directed by Julie Bertuccelli, this 2016 documentary explores the remarkable Helene Nicolas, a 30-year-old French woman who, despite severe autism, expresses her deepest thoughts and feelings through an astonishing ability for poetic wordplay. By using Scrabble-like letters, she composes startling sentences and phrases that encapsulate profound insights and concepts.
7:15 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 2 in Room 102 of the SJU Arts Building. Frantz. This film from 2016 won the French best-movie Oscar. Directed by Francois Ozon, it’s about a young German woman, Anna, whose fiancé, Frantz, was killed in World War I and how a French veteran of the war, Adrien, comes to town to place flowers on Frantz’s grave. The presence of this former “enemy” causes discord among the townspeople and yet Anna gradually warms to the man and learns of the deep friendship he held for Frantz.
7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 8. Room 120 in the CSB Gorcecki Center. Loin des hommes. Directed by David Oelhoffen, this 2015 movie (in English, known as Far From Men) is based on a short story (L’hote – The Guest) by celebrated French Nobel-Prize author Albert Camus. It concerns a French schoolteacher in colonial-French Algeria and his crisis of conscience when he is asked to hand over an Algerian accused of murder to French authorities. Viggo Mortensen stars as the schoolteacher. The Algerian Arab is played by Reda Kateb. The movie touches upon themes of guilt, complicity and colonial assumptions just before the Algerian war of independence from France in the 1950s.
Using tiles of alphabet letters, Helene Nicolas, who suffers from severe autism, forms words, phrases and sentences of astonishing lyrical, poetic power. Her loving mother watches from the side. Both are featured in the French documentary entitled Dernieres nouvelles du cosmos, which is one of six French movies, with English subtitles, to be screened during a French Film Festival at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. All are welcome to attend.
