2023 UNI French Film Festival
Ready to stream something new?
All films are free, but advanced registration is required.
Stream these French language films (subtitled in English) on your own computer, and join the Zoom discussion online. / Regardez les films en streaming (sous-titrés en anglais) sur votre ordinateur, puis participez aux visioconférences pour en discuter avec d'autres personnes.
Film discussions take place on Monday nights at 7:00 p.m. after the streaming week. Join the conversation either in person at ScholarWorks (Rod 301) on online via Zoom (registration required). NOTE: the March 6 film discussion will be in Rod 287.
Les indes galantes / Gallantes Indies
This is a premiere for 30 dancers of hip-hop, krump, break, voguing… a first for the director Clément Cogitore and for the choreographer Bintou Dembélé. And a first for the Paris’ Opera Bastille. By bringing together urban dance and opera singing, they reinvent Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque masterpiece, Les indes galantes. From rehearsals to public performances, it is a human adventure and a meeting of political realities: can a new generation of artists storm the Bastille today?
Josep
February 1939. Spanish republicans are fleeing Franco’s dictatorship to France. The French government built concentration camps, confining the refugees, where they barely have access to hygiene, water and food. In one of these camps, separated by barbed wire, two men will become friends. One is a guard, the other is Josep Bartoli (Barcelona 1910 – NYC 1995), an illustrator who fights against Franco’s regime.
France
Léa Seydoux brilliantly grounds Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film, which starts out as a satire of the contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something richer and darker. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont (The Life of Jesus, NYFF35) casts Seydoux as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose life is disrupted after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street. This accident triggers a series of self-reckonings, as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. France is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent—a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.
Nous / We
The RER B is an urban train that traverses Paris and its environs from north to south. A moving testament to the importance of filming as a process of bearing witness and remembering, We is subtle and shrewd in a world which favors shortcuts and easy answers. Director Alice Diop displays impressive control of her essay and its impact. Divisions haunt France’s present. But the human urge to give as well as to receive stubbornly creeps into every situation, observed or triggered. Could this be the one thing that still keeps a nation together?
Lingui, les liens sacrés / Lingui, the Sacred Bonds
Amina, a practicing Muslim, lives with her daughter, 15-year-old Maria. When Amina learns Maria is pregnant and wants to abort the child, they face an impossible situation in a country where abortion is legally and morally condemned.
Illusions perdues / Lost Illusions
Lucien is a young unknown poet in 19th-century France. He has great expectations and wants to forge a destiny. He leaves the family printing business in his native province to try his luck in Paris, on the arm of his protector. Soon left to his own devices in the fabulous city, the young man will discover the backstage of a world dedicated to the law of profit and pretense. He will love, he will suffer, and survive his illusions.
2023 UNI French Film Festival
This series is sponsored by the UNI Department of Languages & Literatures with support of the UNI French Program Fund. Albertine Cinémathèque (a program of FACE Foundation) and Villa Albertine, with support from the CNC / Centre National du Cinema, and SACEM / Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain. Co-sponsored by the UNI Departments of Art, Communication & Media, Curriculum & Instruction, History, Philosophy & World Religions, Theatre, the Program in Women's & Gender Studies and the School of Music.