The annual French Film Festival, organized by the French and Modern Culture and Media Departments, kicks off Thursday, Feb. 19 at the Cable Car Cinema and Cafe. Composed of 19 films and one program of shorts, this year's line-up has a special focus on female directors and producers.
The women featured in the festival range from cinema newcomers to established veterans. Celine Sciamma is making her directorial debut with "Naissance des pieuvres" ("Waterlilies"), while 80-year-old director Agnes Varda boasts over five decades of experience in French cinema. A popular figure known for grappling with feminist issues, Varda is the subject of her own retrospective, "Les plages d'Agnes" ("The Beaches of Agnes").
The festival will include a talk by Geraldine Michelot, producer of three of the films showing this year, all of which were showcased at the Cannes Film Festival. Her "Versailles" is nominated for a Cesar award - the French equivalent of an Oscar - for best first film of the year.
The event's other two guests are French-Canadians Simon-Olivier Fecteau and Marc-Andre Lavoie, who collaborated on "Bluff," a dark comedy showing in the festival.
Richard Manning, film archivist in the MCM department and one of the festival coordinators, said the planning committee chose cinematic pieces that represent multiple cultures and experiences.
"We intentionally want to make our selection of films across genres and countries," Manning said.
Shoggy Waryn, a senior lecturer in French studies, echoed Manning. "We are talking about French-speaking cinema, not merely French as in from France," Waryn wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
Waryn said he expects the coming-of-age story "Waterlilies" to be "the sleeper hit of the festival." "Capitaine Achab," on the other hand, is a new take on "Moby Dick" that focuses on four nonsequential segments in the title character's life. "Les Enfants de Don Quichotte" is a documentary that tackles the issue of homelessness in France. "Kinshasa Palace" is, in Manning's words, "a real smart road movie" detailing a man's journey through Lisbon, France, Belgium and Cambodia to find his brother, a Congolese war refugee.
The black-and-white film "La frontiere de l'aube" is "in some ways a romantic melodrama, but has a real subtle sense of horror that jolts the audience," Manning said. "It's not an easy film."
Waryn said he is most interested in movies that are very different from American cinema. "Some can be quite 'charming' in a French way, but more often than not, their narrative structures are quite off-beat - their subject matter, too," he said. "Very often, we are talking about one-of-a-kind films."
The opportunity to screen these movies, some of which are making their North American premieres, is a unique one, and though the festival is open to the Providence community as a whole, Manning said he hopes to see more students in the audience than have attended in years past. He said that often the last few days of the festival bring more students, many of whom attend as part of a course requirement.
The French Film Festival runs through Sunday, March 1. Film synopses, trailers and a full schedule of screening times can be found on the Cable Car Web site. Tickets for each film are available on the day it shows.
