French Film Fest takes audiences from terror-struck Paris to the Côte d’Azur

The painful ripple results of current Parisian trauma are the topic of three main movies on this yr’s 34^th French Movie Competition. November, the most important movie on the field workplace in France final yr, follows the manhunt as investigators race in opposition to time to search out terrorists following the 2015 assaults by gunmen and suicide bombers on the Bataclan live performance corridor, a stadium, eating places and bars.

The pageant’s creative director, Karine Mauris, who was working within the music business in 2015 and had mates caught up within the assaults, mentioned she knocked again one other movie about terrorism as a result of she didn’t need to overload the viewers.

“In November you aren’t with the victims, you might be with the police, and so they don’t know who did it, how will they cease them, [if] will they assault once more,” Mauris says.

“The director [Cédric Jimenez] has a method of placing you on the coronary heart of the motion with the digital camera on the shoulder. It’s so attention-grabbing; there’s a lot interplay.”

Paris Reminiscences can also be set within the aftermath of the 2015 assaults. Considered one of French cinema’s new era of stars, Virginie Efira, performs Mia, whose dinner in a restaurant is shattered by gunfire that kills some and leaves others struggling to make sense of getting survived. Mia has nearly no recollection of the evening however slowly recovers snatches of reminiscence, like somebody extending a hand and telling her to lie nonetheless, that she can be okay.

“Virginie is in two motion pictures, and each are simply extraordinary,” Mauris says. “I actually fought for this film. It’s a story concerning the assaults, and it’s made by Alice Winocour, whose brother was on the Bataclan. He survived, however he was inside, so she has been touched by this story.”

In an identical class is Notre-Dame on Hearth, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose distinguished work contains Seven Years in Tibet and The Identify of the Rose. The movie re-creates the efforts made by fire-fighting groups to avoid wasting the treasured landmark cathedral. (A tv sequence, Notre Dame, on Netflix, does one thing related.)

“It really works nicely with November as a result of right here you might be with firemen who’ve to avoid wasting a constructing, and the attention-grabbing query inside is how far ought to we go to avoid wasting monuments,” Mauris says. “It is extremely nicely carried out, and also you see how important all of it was.”

Mauris, who selected 39 motion pictures from the 85 she noticed final yr, is providing a intentionally numerous program with strands of comedy, romance, thrillers, social drama and youngsters’s movies. She says they’re movies that needs to be seen on the large display and argues it could be legal to look at them every other method.

“The message for this pageant is, ‘Come again to the theatre, to be all collectively within the room, to really feel what others really feel, even when it’s with a completely unknown individual’,” says Mauris, who’s cultural attaché to the French Embassy in Australia. “It’s so vital to create this hyperlink.”

The opening evening presentation, Masquerade, harks again to old-style French glamour and duplicity on the French Côte d’Azur.

“Sea, intercourse and solar,” Mauris says, quoting the track by Serge Gainsbourg.

Starring Pierre Niney as Adrien, an injured dancer who turns into a gigolo to assist his way of life, it sees the return of French magnificence Isabelle Adjani, now in her 60s, as Adrien’s mark.

“It’s a thriller and it’s all about ladies ­– the ladies are all on prime,” Mauris says. “For this director, Nicolas Bedos, the lads are simply toys. It feels very ’70s and I just like the ambiance. There may be quite a lot of cynicism.”

Mauris says there have been so many high quality movies this yr she added one other after programming was closed: Lie With Me, primarily based on the semi-autobiographical novel of Philippe Besson, seems to be again on closeted old flame in rural France. The movie introduced her to tears and he or she needed individuals to see it.

“It wasn’t simply me, everybody noticed the fantastic thing about this love story. It’s unbelievable.”

Films exploring robust social points embody Saint Omer, a couple of younger journalist who covers the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). It’s a fictionalised retelling of the trial three years in the past of Fabienne Kabou, who left her 15-month-old daughter on a seaside to be swallowed by the waves. Requested why, she mentioned: “Witchcraft. That’s my default rationalization as a result of I’ve no different.”

Fashionable actress Laure Calamy (Name My Agent) is in three movies, most notably Annie’s Hearth, a social drama a couple of fortunately married girl struggling to entry an abortion in France in 1974, a yr earlier than the process grew to become authorized.

“She meets the people who find themselves combating for the liberation of the physique and the appropriate to abortion, and it is filled with humanity and characters with completely different histories,” Mauris says. “Laure Calamy is wonderful as a girl who’s completely pleased with youngsters and a husband, after which she discovers this motion and its solidarity.”

Legendary actor Gerard Depardieu, 74, continues to drown out his critics, showing in two movies together with Umami, through which he performs a jaded chef attempting to rediscover his ardour for meals (Depardieu has his personal cooking present, Bon Appetit, on SBS). In Robuste, he confronts himself extra personally within the function of a once-famous actor, George, with a popularity for being fats, irascible and boorish, who types an odd friendship with a younger assistant, Aissa (Deborah Lukumuena).

An replace of the much-loved youngsters’s movie Belle and Sébastien, titled Belle and Sébastien: Subsequent Era and starring an enormous Pyrenean Mountain canine, is within the household program alongside Journey Above, that includes Mélanie Laurent, a couple of younger lady with a ardour for horses who suffers a devastating damage.

“It’s lovely to see on the large display and it’s for 9 to 18 yr olds – it’s a household film that works for everyone,” Mauris says.

She says this yr’s pageant choice options fewer feminine administrators than final yr, however they’re all distinctive and symbolize a brand new era of filmmakers, amongst them Mia Hansen-Løve, whose 2021 launch Bergman Island starred Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. Hansen-Løve’s new drama, One Nice Morning, contains autobiographical components and follows a single mum attempting to steadiness her personal emotional wants with these of her mother and father and little one.

“With none shock, Mia is on the highest – and he or she has [actor] Léa Seydoux, who we need to see as a result of she was in James Bond!” Mauris says.

The Alliance Française French Movie Competition runs from March 23 to April 19 at Palace Nova Eastend and Prospect cinemas. The pageant can also be presenting chosen screenings in cinemas throughout regional South Australia.