Post date: Nov 14, 2013 4:51:11 PM
10th Annual French and Francophone Film Festival
Tournées @ SDSU
November 21-23, 2013
Little Theater 161
Admission is FREE
This year's festival kicks off on Thursday, Nov 21 at 7pm with Beloved in which
director Christophe Honoré revisits the musical. Beloved is an intricate weaving of multiple romantic triangles and world-changing milestones.
Friday, Nov 22 opens with Americano, the feature-length directorial debut of actor Mathieu Demy-the son of eminent filmmakers Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda. Demy plays Martin, a Parisian real estate agent in his late 30s. After he receives news of his mother's death, he flies to Los Angeles, her home for the past several decades, to settle her affairs. Americano screens at 6pm.
The historical fiction, Farewell my Queen, is Benoît Jacquot's nimble, lush adaptation of Chantal Thomas's 2003 novel about the chaos at Versailles on the eve of the 1789 revolution, told not through the vantage point of the monarchs but through the eyes of Sidonie, the besotted reader to Marie Antoinette. Farewell my Queen screens at 8.
The festival concludes Saturday, Nov 23 with 3 films. Elza, Mariette Monpierre's debut full-length film, a searing melodrama uncovering the racial prejudices that still exist among formerly colonized peoples, and an inspiring tale of one young woman's quest to understand her past in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Elza screens at 4 pm.
Something in the Air, set in the early 1970s, is a bracing semi-autobiographical film from Olivier Assayas that resists easy nostalgia, focusing instead on the turbulence of one's late teens and early twenties. While delving deeply into Gilles's private dramas as he tries to define himself as an artist, Assayas never lets us forget that this richly drawn adolescent protagonist is also a player in a much broader historical moment: the era when revolutionary hopes began to splinter and fade.Something in the Air screens at 5:30 pm
Sister is Ursula Meier's accomplished second film. A keenly observed examination of class differences and tenuous family ties, it focuses on 12-year-old Simon and his desperate attempts to survive in a bleak housing project in the valley of a posh Swiss ski resort. Sister screens at 8pm.