French Film Festival at Brown University with Alice Diop

Organized by the department of French and Francophone studies of Brown University, the Providence French and Francophone Film Festival will feature 15 screenings of French and Francophone films released in 2023-2024.    

This 30^th edition will resonate with questions and concerns about our world, where threatening horizons coexist with fragile yet necessary resistance. The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop will be the guest of honor of this edition.

Born in 1979, Alice Diop is renowned for her documentaries about contemporary French society and her first feature film Saint-Omer, released in 2022, which won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film at the 79^th Venice International Film Festival. The movie was also selected by France to represent the country at the Oscars. 

For this festive anniversary, the Providence French and Francophone Film Festival will revolve around Alice Diop’s “Carte Blanche.” In the presence of Alice Diop, the festival will open with the screening of “We,” her acclaimed 2022 documentary on the peripheral zones of Paris. Her other documentary “Clichy pour l’exemple” (2006), “Kindertotenlieder” by Virgil Vernier, and “Europe 2005 – 27 Octobre” directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub will also be screened, as part of her “Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World,” a project that began in 2020 with the Centre Georges Pompidou and les Ateliers Médicis. This initiative aims to revisit dominant images of the suburbs by documenting people and places. Alice Diop will also be present to pay tribute to Chantal Akerman, a leading figure in Belgian cinema, for the tenth anniversary of her death, with the screening of her masterpiece “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”  

The movie lineup of the festival will probe the margins of capital cities, of the West, of old and new empires, whose representations and narratives are often questioned, with the screenings of “Souleymane’s Story” by Boris Lojkine (2024), winner of “Un certain regard” at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “This Life of Mine” by Sophie Fillières, and “Through the Night” by Delphine Girard (2023). Alongside these films, at times haunted by silences, others much more hyperbolic in nature will be screened, including “Wild Diamond” by Agathe Riedinger (2024), Quentin Dupieux’s “Second Act” (2024), and “Testament” (2023) directed by the Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand.  

Discover the full lineup here.

The Providence French and Francophone Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Department of French and Francophone Studies of Brown University bringing the best of French and Francophone contemporary films to Providence and the broader community of Rhode Island since 1995.