Bienvenue! Welcome to the official website of the 2022 UVA French Film Festival. Please check this page regularly, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter, for updates and information about the festival.

This festival is free and open to the public.

Please note that masks will be required at all screenings regardless of vaccination status.

Spacing between parties will be strongly encouraged, but cannot be guaranteed due to unpredictable attendance numbers.

Thank you for helping to keep our community safe and healthy.

Émergence & Emergency

In planning this year's French Film Festival, we made it our aim to select films that would speak to the intense, and often conflicting, feelings evoked by the pandemic, protests, and politics that have recently affected all of our lives. The words "émergence" and "emergency" continually came to mind—two words, two languages, two different meanings that both describe our current situation. To explore these concepts, we instinctively turned to the stories of young people who are particularly aware of a relationship between urgency and possibility. The films included in our festival portray emerging youth and the urgent, contemporary issues that young people face as they come of age in today's world. Through these films, we hope to begin a dialogue on various kinds of émergence: how young people have been central to recent social movements, how the turmoil of growing up speaks to the broader human experience, and how films (particularly those made in the last two years) might address our gradual emergence from a global pandemic. With these topics in mind, we have aspired to create a festival that acknowledges the gravity of our ongoing struggles while leaving room for a hopeful future and the generations that will form it.

– The Festival Committee