NEW YORK, November 22, 2016– The third edition of the Young French Cinema program, which opens in January 2017 and runs through the year, will offer American theaters, universities, film societies, art house cinemas, the Alliance Française network and other organizations the opportunity to screen contemporary French films and hold discussions with French filmmakers. The program is co-produced annually by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and UniFrance, in partnership with Telefilm, ACID and CineConductor.
Contemporary French directors have received considerable praise in recent years by the international press for their “sensuality and intellectual engagement” and their “emotional and carefree storytelling style.” Young French Cinema was developed to give American venues access to a broad selection of work from these rising talents, ranging from high-profile independent works and quirky comedies, to documentaries and shorts. Most of the films in the selection have premiered in 2015/2016 in top international festivals.
The program has proven successful, with over 100 bookings in 2016 at institutions such as Getaway Film Center à Columbus, Ohio; the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, Long Island; the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Pennsylvania; the Film Society of Minneapolis in Saint Paul, Honolulu Museum in Hawaii, the Denver Film Society in Colorado, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, Illinois; and the Festival Cinéma du monde de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada.
The 2017 selection offers a new batch of films by young directors with films that tackle a wide range of subject matter as varied as sustainable development (Tomorrow), fraternity (Spartacus & Cassandra), loss (This Summer Feeling), coming of age (Haramiste) and adolescence (The Geneva Convention). It also features co-productions such as French-Moroccan Much Loved by Nabil Ayouc, and French-German This Summer Feeling by Mikhaël Hers. Since 2016, the program has been widened to include a ‘Canadian Pick’ which highlights on film from Canada, and features Ville-Marie by Guy Edoin as this year’s selection.
The 2017 Young French Cinema selection presents 12 full-length features as well as 8 short features, available for screening are listed below.
Full-Length Features:
• Tomorrow (Demain) by Mélanie Laurent and Cyril Dion, which won the 2016 César Award for Best Documentary Film. Laurent and Dion’s alarming report on current environmental situation
• A German Youth (Une jeunesse allemande) by Jean-Gabriel Périot, nominated for César Award of Best Documentary in 2016 Deals with the traumatic years of German leftist terrorism and unrest to question the legacy of Nazism.
• A Young Poet (Un jeune poète) by Damien Manivel. A summer tale of a young poet searching for inspiration in a seaside town.
• The Ogres (Les ogres) by Léa Fehner. A struggling traveling theater company which overcomes a painful past, unruly performers, and an invasion of bovines to keep performing in the fields and vacant lots of southwest France.
• Much Loved by Nabil Ayouch, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival. It features the lives of four high-end prostitutes in present-day Marrakesh.
• Spartacus & Cassandra by Ioanis Nuguet. The film features the life of Spartacus, 13, and his sister Cassandra, 11, two children of Romani beggars in Paris.
• Swagger by Olivier Babinet. A documentary about like in the projects of the tough Paris suburbs of Aulnay-sous-Bois.
• Struggle for Life (La loi de la jungle) by Antonin Peretjatko. In his thirties, deadbteat Marc Châtaigne gets an intership with a French government ministry which consists in launching a ski resort in tropical French Guyana.
• The Woods Dreams are Made Of (Le bois dont les rêves sont faits) by Claire Simon. An engaging documentary on people in the Bois de Vincennes, a sprawling park on Paris’s southeast edge.
• This Summer Feeling (Ce sentiment de l’été) by Mikhaël Hers. It depicts three summers in the lives of those who loved Sasha, a young French woman who suddenly dies.
• Uncompleted Song (Comment c’est loin) by Orelsan and Christophe Offenstein. An hilarious and heartwarming autobiographical tale of leading French rapper Orelsan’s struggle to make his hip-hop dreams come true.
Shorts:
• Alice by Karine Silla Perez. A woman gives birth to a baby wearing a bracelet with the letter X, after which she starts thinking of the consequences.
• Field of Vipers (Campo de Víboras) by Cristèle Alves Meira, in competition for 2017 Cannes Festivals’ short films category. In a small Portuguese village, an old lady is found dead in her garden while her daughter fled without telling anyone.
• Haramiste by Antoine Desrosières. An 18 years-old veiled woman reminds her younger sister that she must not go talk at the young man she likes.
• Joint-Tenants (Colocataires) by Delphine Priet-Mahéo. A woman’s ordinary life if shaken up by a man’s discreet slips inside her house.
• Love by Réka Bucsi. An affection is described in three different chapters.
• The Geneva Convention (La Convention de Genève) by Benoît Martin. A young man is cought in a vendetta between teenagers, which he ends up having to take part of it.
•When You Hear the Bells (Au bruit des clochettes) by Chabname Zariab. A “batcha”, a young male prostitute living in Afhganistan feels threatened by another young boy as he progressively attracts the attention of his master.
• Partner (Réplique) by Antoine Giorgini. A candidate to an audition for a drama school feels betrayed after realizing his reading partner will not show up to the audition.
In Partnership with Téléfilm Canada:
• Ville-Marie by Guy Édoin. At the Ville-Marie hospital in Montreal, two women face the metaphorical or literal loss of their sons.
The Cultural Services of the French Embassy promotes the best of French arts, literature, cinema, language, and higher education across the US. Based in New York City, Washington D.C., and eight other cities across the country, the Cultural Services brings artists, authors, educational and university programs to cities nationwide. It also builds partnerships between French and American artists, institutions and universities on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York, through its bookshop Albertine, it fosters French-American exchange around literature and the arts.www.frenchculture.orgUniFrance is the organization in charge of promoting French cinema throughout the world. Created in 1949, in the form of an association under the law of 1901, UniFrance films is administered by French state authorities, in particular the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée). The association has nearly 1000 members: producers of feature films and shorts, sales agents, directors, actors, authors (screenwriters) and talent agents. www.unifrance.org
Media Contacts
Camille Desprez – + 1 (212) 439-1417 – camille.desprez@diplomatie.gouv.frFrenchculture.org – @franceinnyc – facebook.com/frenchculture