Parlez-vous francais? No? It's okay if you don't speak French. You can still enjoy the 3rd Tournées Film Festival featuring French films free of charge next week at CFCC's Union Station, corner of Front & Red Cross Streets. All the films have subtitles. Caroline Hudson, from France, has spearheaded this festival for the past 3 years. The sponsor is the FACE Foundation: French-American Cultural Exchange. Listen to Caroline and film instructor Lucinda McNamara talk about the quality of French films and the selections for this year's festival. Here is the schedule, featuring 5 new films and one classic:
Monday, 2/20 @ 6:00pm: Pierrot Le Fou (1965). Arguably the masterpiece of Jean-Luc Godard’s glorious first period, that extraordinary burst of creativity that extends from his landmark debut Breathless to the political films of the late sixties.
Tuesday, 2/21 @ 12:30pm: Francofonia (2015). The great Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s heroically ambitious meditation on European culture and history as seen through the story of the Louvre museum in Paris, with a particular focus on its fortunes during World War II.
Wednesday, 2/22 @6:00pm: Valley of Love (2016). Thirty-five years after playing a bourgeois woman and her thug lover in Maurice Pialat’s classic Loulou, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu are finally reunited in Guillaume Nicloux’s deeply original Valley of Love.
Thursday, 2/23 @ 12:30pm: Réalité (2015). Combine David Lynch’s headscratching wildness and Charlie Kaufman’s hilarious worst-case scenarios, throw in a pinch of Luis Buñuel’s wicked irreverence and a streak of cruel French humor, and you’ll be a little closer to understanding how far outside convention this delightfully fearless, mind-bending comedy dwells.
Thursday, 2/23 @ 6:00pm: My Golden Days (2016). Mathieu Amalric reprises the role of Paul Dédalus from Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…Or How I Got into an Argument. Paul, now an anthropologist, prepares to leave Tajikistan and reflects on his life. He has a series of flashbacks that unfold in three episodes.
Friday, 2/24 @ 6:00pm: Saint Laurent (2015). With this lushly executed, unorthodox biopic of superstar couturier Yves Saint Laurent, French director Bertrand Bonello has established himself as one of the leading auteurs of our time.