2026 French Film Festival at Duke University

MISERCORDIA [Miséricorde] (Alain Guiraudie, 2024, 103 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, DCP)

— Ranked Best Film of 2024 by Cahiers du Cinéma

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (STRANGER BY THE LAKE, NYFF51), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising-and ultimately beneficial-friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in MISERICORDIA, again upending all genre expectations.
More details

“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
(Johan Grimonprez, 2024, 150 min, Belgium/France/Netherlands, French, Dutch, and Russian with English subtitles, DCP)

— 2025 Oscar Nominee for Best Documentary

United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP d’ETAT interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.
More details.

GHOST TRAIL [Les Fantômes] (Jonathan Millet, 2024, 106 min, France/Belgium/Germany, French, Arabic, Turkish, and English with English subtitles, DCP)

Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge-but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world-and our own.
More details

HOLY COW [Vingt Dieux] (Louise Courvoisier, 2024, 90 min, France, French with English subtitles, DCP)

— Winner of two César Awards including Best First Film and Best Female Revelation (Maïwene Barthelemy)

Following the sudden death of his farmer father, hard-partying 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) is abruptly obliged to step into the role of man of the house in Louise Courvoisier’s directorial debut, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Taking a job at a nearby dairy farm, where he quickly falls for the farmer’s daughter, Totone makes up his mind to jump-start his family’s future via an unorthodox shortcut: winning a 30,000 Euro prize for producing the best Comté in the region. In this warm, lived-in coming-of-age fable-a treat for cheese-loving cinephiles in particular-Courvoisier brings together a cast of non-professional actors from the Jura region where she herself grew up, creating a rich depiction of rural agricultural life that’s also a crowd-pleasing story about the unlikely detours that shape the utterly unpredictable process of growing up.
More details

MEETING WITH POL POT [Rendez-vouz avec Pol Pot] (Rithy Panh, 2024, 112 min, France/Cambodia, French and Cambodian with English subtitles, DCP)

Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) – 1978. Three journalists are invited by the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large scale genocide. Under the eyes of the journalists, the beautiful picture cracks, revealing the horror. Their journey progressively turns into a nightmare.

This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER: CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE REVOLUTION, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture-historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it.
More details