UNI’s first French Film Festival will be happening virtually during the Spring 2021 semester. In coordination with the Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundation, the Department of Languages and Literatures will present six French language films (subtitled in English) that you will be able to stream on your computer and discuss via Zoom.

To join the Tuesday night conversations about specific films, just click the "Zoom discussion" link below. Better yet add the following link (the same one for each discussion) to your electronic calendar: https://uni.zoom.us/j/93903504393.

Schedule:

Synonymes/Synonyms

With his third feature and first film set in France, Israeli writer-Director Nadav Lapid provides an incendiary reminder that cinema is most powerful when it raises questions rather than provides answers, when every shot seems born of the desire to try out a new idea rather than bow to narrative convention, and when every scene feels as inevitable as it is surprising. With Synonyms, Lapid turned to his own experience as a young exile in France twenty years ago to tell the story of Yoav, a young Israeli who arrives in Paris knowing no one and barely speaking French but committed to forgetting his homeland and becoming a Frenchman. On his first night in Paris, Yoav is robbed of everything he owns and throws himself on the mercy of a bourgeois couple who will become his guides in the French approach to art, friendship, and sex. But the shadow of Yoav’s troubled native land is never far away. Subversively funny, brilliantly executed, constantly astonishing, and tragic in its political implications, Synonyms won a richly deserved Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, confirming Nadav Lapid’s reputation as one of the most promising filmmakers to emerge in the last decade.

Director: Nadav Lapid

Screenplay:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid

Cast:
Tom Mercier
Quentin Dolmaire
Louise Chevillotte

Details:
Drama
French and Hebrew
123 min.
France, Israel
2019

Distributor: Kino Lorber

Price Range: $400

Available On: Amazon, Youtube, GooglePlay, FandangoNow, AppleTv, Vudu, The Criterion Chanel

Virtual Screening Platforms: Kino Marquee and Vimeo

7:00pm: Zoom discussion of Synonymes/Synonyms

Click Here for Zoom Link

Varda par Agnès/Varda by Agnès

Varda by Agnès, the last film by the late great Agnès Varda, is a typically joyous, digressive, and revealing ramble through the Director’s work, based on a series of lectures she gave in the last years of her life. Composed of numerous clips from Varda’s films and public appearances, as well as extensive documentation of her gallery installations, the film provides both an introduction to and a summation of the extraordinary achievement of the woman who kicked off the French New Wave with La Pointe Courte, a groundbreaking, independently financed mix of poetic realism and documentary, and continued to make epochal narrative films (Cleo from 5 to 7; One Sings, the Other Doesn’t; Vagabond) and pioneering documentary works that combined a boundless curiosity about the world and a generous art of self-revelation (The Gleaners and I; Faces Places). But as anyone who has ever seen an Agnès Varda movie knows, Varda would not simply be satisfied with retreading her accomplishments: this is a film as open to the future as it is to the past, full of insight and inspiration for young filmmakers, artists, and thinkers, and imbued with Varda’s incomparable swiftness of thought and warmth of feeling.

Director: Agnès Varda

Screenplay: Agnès Varda

Cast: Agnès Varda

Details:
Documentary
French
120 min.
France
2019

Distributor: Janus Films

Available On: The Criterion Channel

Virtual Screening Platform: Eventive

Price Range:
Tier 1: $200 for up to 50 free views.
Tier 2: $275 for up to 75 free views.
Tier 3: $350 for up to 100 free views.
Additional views are available at the rate of $75 per each additional batch of 25 views. We ask that venues set the number of views they would like to purchase in advance.

Click Here To Register for the Festival (it's free, and you only have to register once no matter how many films you choose to watch). Registering will get you an email a couple days before the screening week with information about how to access films online.

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