French Film Festival

Florida Atlantic University presents the Tournees French Film Festival from Monday, March 9 through Monday, April 6, 2015. All movies will be shown in the Performing Arts Building, Room 101, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus.

Films are in French with English subtitles and will be introduced, with discussion to follow, by FAU faculty.  The shows include "Bastards," "Berlin 1885: The Division of Africa," "The Grand Illusion," "The Missing Picture," "Camille Claudel 1915": and "The French Minister."

• "Bastards" Monday, March 9, 6:30 p.m. Claire Denis's scalding examination of the abuse of power and the sin of looking the other way may be the year's most unforgettable film noir. Inspired by William Faulkner's 1931 novel, "Sanctuary," and the Sadean sex parties attended by Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other French higher-ups. "Bastards" centers on a revenge plot that begins tenuously but grows only more inexorable.
• "Berlin 1885: The Division of Africa" Wednesday, March 11, 6:30 p.m. This  documentary exposes one of the most ignominious--and little-studied--events of the past 130 years. Joël Calmettes's film chronicles the Berlin Conference on Africa. At this meeting, held at Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's official residence in Berlin, the major European countries and the United States divided up the vast continent for their own personal gain, setting in motion the ruinous colonization of Africa that continued for the next several decades.
• "The Grand Illusion" Wednesday, March 18, 6:30 p.m. Set during World War I, this masterwork by Jean Renoir was shot just three years before the beginning of World War II. Renoir, who himself had flown reconnaissance missions during WWI, examines the relationships that form among a group of French officers held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Within this detention center, class, religious, and national divisions increasingly cease to matter.

• "The Missing Picture" Monday, March 23, 6:30 p.m. Rithy Panh ingeniously uses carved and painted figures to represent himself and his family (and many others), who had to flee Phnom Penh for agricultural labor camps on April 17, 1975, the day that the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia's capital city. In calm, occasionally astringent first-person narration (read by Randal Douc), we learn that Panh was 13 when Pol Pot began his genocidal regime.
• "Camille Claudel 1915" Wednesday, April 1, 6:30 p.m. The film traces just three days of Claudel's grim life at the Montdevergues mental asylum near Avignon, where she had been committed by her family. The producer potently conveys Claudel's abject state--her irrational fear that she may be poisoned, her increasing agitation over the fact that she was incarcerated against her will.
• "The French Minister" Monday, April 6, 6:30 p.m. this razor-sharp satire of politics--both those enacted on the world stage and within the corridors of workplaces--originated in first-hand experience: The film is adapted from graphic novels written by Antonin Baudry, who worked as a speechwriter for Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister during the lead-up to the 2003 war in Iraq.

View printable Tournees Film Festival schedule...

The Tournees Festival is presented by FAU's Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. For more information, contact Roderick Cooke at 561-297-0341 or cooker@fau.edu.