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Co-presented with UniFrance, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema returns with another edition that exemplifies the range and verve of contemporary French filmmaking. The titles this year, by emerging talents and time-honored masters, thrill and surprise, and many take audiences to entirely new places. The festival features the latest from established favorites Philippe Faucon (Fatima), Julie Delpy (Lolo), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (Story of Judas), and Catherine Corsini (Summertime), as well as remarkabledebuts from Louis Garrel (Two Friends), Nicolas Pariser (The Great Game), and Eva Husson (Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)). Additional highlights include gems from Cannes and beyond: Alice Winocour’s Disorder, Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved, 21 Nights with Pattieby Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu, and Three Sisters by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. For this year’s Opening Night film, we are proud to present Guillaume Nicloux’s elegiac Valley of Love, which reunites Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert on-screen for the first time in over 35 years, and whose tour-de-force performances are guaranteed to mesmerize. Co-presented with UniFrance, this year’s Rendez-Vous demonstrates that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile as ever, and the voices calling from it never more distinct.
Lineup
Dheepan
Jacques Audiard, France, 2015, DCP, 109m
French with English subtitles
Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this daring, genre-bending portrait of three Sri Lankan refugees—Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby)—who form a fake family unit to emigrate. When they find themselves living together in a violent, gang-dominated housing project outside Paris, they start to reevaluate the terms of their intimacy. Like his character, the actor and novelist Jesuthasan was a member of the militant nationalist army LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) before fleeing the country and settling into a series of odd jobs in Paris, while eventually renouncing all ties to the Tigers. When, in its bloody last act, his character has to fall back on his military training, Dheepan becomes something darker: a harrowing reckoning with the past. A Sundance Selects release.
Sunday, March 13, 6:00pm & 8:30pm
21 Nights with Pattie / 21 nuits avec Pattie
Jean-Marie & Arnaud Larrieu, France, 2015, DCP, 115m
French with English subtitles
The Larrieu brothers make oddball, tonally mixed comedies unlike anything else in French cinema today. In their latest, a slightly prim woman Caroline (Isabelle Carré) arrives in a small village in the Pyrénées to bury her estranged mother. There, she befriends Pattie (Karin Viard), who offers tales of her sexual adventures with the local men, including a priapic half-man, half-beast creature (Denis Lavant). Caroline’s ongoing debate between pride and pleasure is just one link in a chain of increasingly wild events: the mysterious disappearance of her mother’s body, the ensuing surreal police investigation, and some shocking revelations about her mother’s former lover, who may or not be the writer J.M.G. Le Clézio—played to perfection by André Dussollier. U.S. Premiere
Friday, March 11, 1:30pm
Saturday, March 12, 6:45pm
The Apaches / Des Apaches
Nassim Amaouche, France, 2015, DCP, 97m
French with English subtitles
Les Inrocks accounted for the six years it took Nassim Amaouche to release his second feature by calling him “a director with a temperament as patient, roving and reflective as his films.” He stars as Samir, a young French-Algerian man lured by a dubious “family” lawyer (André Dussollier) into making an occult business deal within a similarly marginalized setting: one of Paris’s largest and most diverse Kabyle communities. Having been drawn into the family bar business by his estranged father, Samir still agonizes over the memory of his late mother, while falling in love with a beautiful and mysterious single mom (Laetitia Casta). The Apaches is a delicate movie that doubles as a tense negotiation drama and a quiet, reflective memory play. U.S. Premiere
Friday, March 4, 4:00pm
Sunday, March 13, 1:30pm
Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
Eva Husson, France, 2016, DCP, 98m
French with English subtitles
Eva Husson’s debut feature, shot and set in the wealthy coastal suburbs of Biarritz, is an unapologetically blissed-out, frankly explicit anthology of the sexual experiments a cluster of teenagers undertake over the course of one summer. Determined to keep the attentions of her favorite boy Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), George (Marilyn Lima) encourages her group of horny friends and acquaintances to start hosting elaborate, sunlight-drenched, EDM-filled swingers parties. Husson doesn’t ignore the students who abstain, but she’s utterly entranced by the excesses, risks, and temptations of George’s universe—a pulsating, slow-motion bacchanal pitched somewhere between the world of Spring Breakers and that of Larry Clark. A Samuel Goldwyn Films release. U.S. Premiere
Friday, March 4, 9:15pm (Q&A with Eva Husson)
Sunday, March 6, 1:00pm (Q&A with Eva Husson)
Dark Inclusion / Diamant noir
Arthur Harari, France/Belgium, 2016, DCP, 115m
French with English subtitles
“You want them to pay? You have to be lucid, cool, precise. You go there, you see, and you take—that’s payback.” Arthur Harari’s first feature is a poised, stylish, and utterly assured revenge thriller in which violence erupts suddenly amid tense, hushed stretches of talk. Pier Ulmann (Niels Schneider) comes from a family of powerful diamond dealers based in Anvers. After his estranged father’s death, he vows vengeance against his relatives who had abandoned him and returns to the business with an elaborate robbery in mind. Featuring menacing tracking shots; a cool, metallic color palette; surprising third-act reversals; and a terrific ensemble cast, Dark Inclusion is a movie precisely attuned to the logistical and moral complexities that accompany lives of luxurious crime. U.S. Premiere
Thursday, March 10, 1:30pm (Introduction by Arthur Harari)
Saturday, March 12, 9:15pm (Q&A with Arthur Harari)
A Decent Man / Je ne suis pas un salaud
Emmanuel Finkiel, France, 2015, DCP, 111m
French with English subtitles
“I am not a bastard!” The literal French translation of the title of Emmanuel Finkiel’s taut, intelligent morality play captures its tone perhaps better than its American name. In the film’s first act, Eddy (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is in a position of strength. Having just been injured in a mugging, he’s earned the sympathy and attention of his estranged family and gotten back on his feet. The same cannot be said for Ahmed (Driss Ramdi), whose life starts falling apart after he’s wrongly accused of the crime. When the case against Ahmed starts to unravel, Eddy has to go back on the defensive… U.S. Premiere
Saturday, March 5, 1:00pm (Q&A with Emmanuel Finkiel)
Monday, March 7, 1:45pm
Disorder
Alice Winocour, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 101m
French with English subtitles
Alice Winocour’s follow-up to Augustine (Rendez-Vous 2013)—her study of the 19th-century neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot’s fraught relationship with one of his hysteria patients—is another finely tuned drama of unstable intimacy and mental imbalance. Having just returned from Afghanistan, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) suffers from night terrors, pummeling headaches, and bouts of paranoia. To distract himself, he gets a job working security at the extravagant chateau of a Lebanese financier, whose beautiful wife (Diane Kruger) he’s soon hired to protect after the husband goes away on business. Disorder evolves from an exercise in nervous, slow-burn suspense into a tense domestic thriller. A Sundance Selects release.
Saturday, March 5, 6:30pm (Q&A with Alice Winocour and Diane Kruger)
Monday, March 7, 4:00pm
Fatima
Philippe Faucon, France, 2015, DCP, 79m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
Middle-aged single mother Fatima (Soria Zeroual) lives with her two teenage daughters and works cleaning jobs to pay their way through school. Inspired by a true story and the poetry of the North African writer Fatima Elayoubi, who immigrated knowing very little French and slowly taught herself the language, Faucon’s eighth feature—winner of the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best French Film—is a patient, reflective study of a woman pressured by her children and her neighbors alike to assimilate into a culture of which she’s wary. Despite the display of everyday racism, both veiled and overt; internal domestic disputes; and external gestures of inhospitality,Fatima offers an uplifting experience and one of recent French cinema’s most trenchant and moving portraits of immigrant experience.
Friday, March 4, 2:00pm
Sunday, March 13, 4:00pm
The Great Game / Le Grand jeu
Nicolas Pariser, France, 2015, DCP, 100m
French with English subtitles
Pierre (Melvil Poupaud), a onetime darling novelist disgusted with the publishing world, lets a duplicitous government insider (André Dussollier) tempt him into ghostwriting a manifesto designed to transform the landscape of French public opinion—a shift with risky consequences for the activist (Clémence Poésy) with whom he soon becomes involved. Nicolas Pariser’s debut feature is an elegant political thriller that makes much use of its stellar cast, particularly with the brittle, uneasy rapport between Poupaud—the soulful young man at the center of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale and Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways—and Dussollier, a resourceful and protean actor who commits to his character’s malevolence with relish. U.S. Premiere
Friday, March 4, 6:30pm (Q&A with Nicolas Pariser and Melvil Poupaud)
Saturday, March 5, 9:15pm (Introduction by Nicolas Pariser and Melvil Poupaud)
Lolo
Julie Delpy, France, 2015, DCP, 99m
French with English subtitles
Writer, director, actor, composer: Julie Delpy is one of current French cinema’s great renaissance talents. In her new movie, a four-string black comedy that develops on the thinking at work in her recent 2 Days in New York, a world-weary fashionista (Delpy) finds her happy new relationship with a divorced, slightly unpolished computer programmer (Dany Boon) threatened by the machinations of her wheeling, malevolent son (Vincent Lacoste). Delpy is a filmmaker with a wise, prickly comic sensibility, and her movies often slide—like screwball comedies—from cerebral verbal banter to outright farce. Lolo is no exception, although it’s also her darkest, riskiest, and most startling movie to date. A FilmRise release. U.S. Premiere
Tuesday, March 8, 6:30pm (Q&A with Julie Delpy and composer Mathieu Lamboley)
Wednesday, March 9, 9:30pm (Introduction by Julie Delpy)
Much Loved
Nabil Ayouch, France/Morocco, 2015, DCP, 104m
Arabic and French with English subtitles
“What do you know about men?” a voice asks over the opening credits of Nabil Ayouch’s provocative portrait of several female sex workers in Marrakech. “Men are like makes [of cars]: high-end, medium, and sons of bitches. All that matters is the cash.” Noha (Loubna Abidar), Randa (Asmaa Lazrak), and Soukaina (Halima Karaouane) are professional, thick-skinned, and practical about their line of work, which ferries them up and down the city’s class ladder and renders them vulnerable to a catalog of possible abuses. Controversially banned in Morocco for its “contempt for moral values,” Much Loved offers such a candid and unblinking picture of a subculture that it’s a perilous job to represent on screen.
Thursday, March 10, 7:00pm
Friday, March 11, 4:00pm
My King / Mon roi
Maïwenn, France, 2015, DCP, 128m
French with English subtitles
Tony (Emmanuelle Bercot, in a performance that won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes) and Georgio (Vincent Cassel) are an odd match—or so Tony’s brother Solal (Louis Garrel) thinks when she tells him that they’re falling quickly, recklessly in love. Actor-director Maïwenn’s fourth feature captures the couple’s tempestuous 10-year relationship in retrospect as a string of flash points, eruptions, betrayals, tender reconciliations, and life-altering decisions. At the center of My King’s wide, expansive frames are Bercot and Cassel for nearly every second of its runtime, and the movie stakes itself on their harrowingly committed, nerve-fraying performances. Maïwenn’s formidable new film is one of French cinema’s most memorable recent amour fous. U.S. Premiere
Wednesday, March 9, 6:30pm (Q&A with Maïwenn and Louis Garrel)
Thursday, March 10, 9:45pm (Introduction by Maïwenn)
The New Kid / Le Nouveau
Rudi Rosenberg, France, 2015, DCP, 81m
French with English subtitles
In this delectable and vivacious debut feature, shy 14-year-old Benoît (Réphaël Ghrenassia) moves to Paris and a new high school, where he’s rejected by his cooler classmates and reluctantly sidelined into a precarious friendship with the “freaks and geeks.” The New Kid is a rare case among coming-of-age movies: a portrait of allegiances made and broken among middle-schoolers that calls special attention to the uglier, less picturesque aspects of passing through puberty. The movie’s rhythm never stalls and its tone stays charmingly light partly thanks to its wonderful cast—a skilled and magnetic group of first-time young actors. U.S. Premiere
Monday, March 7, 6:30pm (Q&A with Rudi Rosenberg)
Wednesday, March 9, 1:30pm
Parisienne / Peur de rien
Danielle Arbid, France, 2015, DCP, 120m
French with English subtitles
The French title of Danielle Arbid’s fourth feature, a luminous study of a young Lebanese woman restlessly accommodating herself to her new home in Paris during the mid-’90s, translates to “fear of nothing.” Lina might sometimes be afraid, but—as played by the great young actress Manal Issa—she’s also intrepid, adventurous, confident, independent, and breathtakingly self-possessed.Parisienne follows her as she flees the abusive uncle in whose care she’s been placed, flits from bed to bed, passes in and out of university classes, makes friends on both extreme sides of the political spectrum, takes a handful of lovers, and, in the movie’s climax, fights a legal battle to stay in the city that’s become hers.
Thursday, March 10, 4:00pm (Q&A with Danielle Arbid)
Saturday, March 12, 1:30pm (Q&A with Danielle Arbid)
Standing Tall / La Tête haute
Emmanuelle Bercot, France, 2015, DCP, 119m
French with English subtitles
Emmanuelle Bercot’s fourth feature, which opened last year’s Cannes, is a candid, sympathetic, impassioned study of a teenage delinquent surrounded by adults both callous and supportive. On the latter side is a warm-hearted juvenile court judge (Catherine Deneuve) and a devoted social worker (Benoît Magimel); on the other side stand, it can seem, most other authority figures. Sixteen-year-old Malony (Rod Paradot) is clearly a victim of his circumstances and poor parenting from his basket case of a mother (Sara Forestier), but he’s also a bully, a brute, and a sexually violent offender. Part of the strength of Standing Tall is that it refuses to entirely absolve its central character; instead, it counts on Paradot, a powerful new actor, to render him as a convincingly troubled, tempestuous soul. A Cohen Media release.
Sunday, March 6, 3:30pm & 9:00pm (Q&A with Emmanuelle Bercot at the 3:30pm screening; introduction at the 9:00pm screening)
Story of Judas / Histoire de Judas
Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, France, 2015, DCP, 99m
French with English subtitles
French-Algerian director-actor Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche boldly renders the final days of Jesus of Nazareth from the perspective of Judas Iscariot in this utterly novel reenvisioning of the key biblical tale. Ameur-Zaïmeche himself stars as Judas, Jesus’s closest disciple, as the two men find themselves swept up in political tumult amid tensions between the Jews and the Romans over the escalating popularity of the man who claims to be the Son of God. Story of Judas is both strikingly stylized (with shimmering, physical cinematography by Irina Lubtchansky, daughter of the late, legendary DP William) and compelling in its engagement with the myth of Judas, interweaving recent revelations about the role he may or may not have played in the real-life Passion story. The result is a ravishing and genuinely new addition to the Jesus film canon. Winner of a Jury Prize in the Forum section at last year’s Berlinale. U.S. Premiere
Saturday, March 5, 3:45pm
Tuesday, March 8, 1:45pm
Summertime / La Belle saison
Catherine Corsini, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 105m
French with English subtitles
Acclaimed director Catherine Corsini has made melodramas that range in tone from the bleak and violent to the tender and emotionally warm. At first glance, her Locarno prize-winning new film is one of her brightest and most bucolic. Soon after Delphine (Izïa Higelin) moves from her conservative parents’ farm near Limoges to Paris in 1971, she meets the older Carole (Cécile de France), a feminist organizer with whom she embarks on a passionate, mutually invigorating love affair. When a family sickness pulls Delphine back to the farm, Carole has to decide whether to follow her into hostile territory—and Summertime becomes something more complicated and fraught than its seductive, luminous visual palette initially suggests. A Strand Releasing release.U.S. Premiere
Tuesday, March 8, 9:15pm (Introduction by composer Grégoire Hetzel)
Saturday, March 12, 4:30pm
Three Sisters / Les Trois soeurs
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France, 2015, DCP, 110m
French with English subtitles
“Life is hard. It seems to many of us dull and hopeless; but yet we must admit that it goes on getting clearer and easier, and it looks as though the time were not far off when it’ll be full of happiness.” For her latest project, commissioned by Arte and starring members of the Comédie-Française, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi shot an idiosyncratic, half-modernized adaptation of one of Chekhov’s greatest, most expansively melancholy plays. The three sisters of the title—two unmarried, one unhappily married—congregate in their family’s ancestral house and, along with the additional soldiers, debtors, pensioners, and spouses who populate the play, struggle to give their futures a shape. From a translation by André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan. U.S. Premiere
Wednesday, March 9, 3:30pm (Q&A with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi)
Friday, March 11, 6:30pm (Q&A with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi)
Two Friends / Deux amis
Louis Garrel, France, 2015, DCP, 102m
French with English subtitles
One of France’s most distinguished and recognizable actors for over a decade now, Louis Garrel makes his much-anticipated feature-length directorial debut with this clever and moving twist on the ménage à trois. Garrel stars as Abel, a gas-station attendant with literary ambitions, an underage girlfriend, and an always-active libido. Abel is all too accustomed to seducing away the crushes of his best friend, movie-extra Vincent (Vincent Macaigne)—but when an incognito convict working at a pastry counter in the Gare du Nord (Golshifteh Farahani) enters Vincent’s orbit (and, by extension, Abel’s), a comic, manic, and eminently romantic love triangle soon unfolds. Co-written by his frequent collaborator Christophe Honoré, Two Friends marks an auspicious and heartfelt first feature for Garrel, striking a pitch-perfect balance between tragedy and charm. U.S. Premiere
Sunday, March 6, 6:30pm (Q&A with Louis Garrel)
Monday, March 7, 9:00pm (Introduction by Louis Garrel)
Winter Song / Chant d’hiver
Otar Iosseliani, France, 2015, DCP, 117m
French with English subtitles
There’s no mistaking the tone and structure of a film by the 81-year-old Georgian director Otar Iosseliani: caustic, mordant, detached, extremely funny, and dizzyingly panoramic. Like several of his earlier films, Winter Song doesn’t center on a single figure so much as a dense cluster of interrelated characters, all united by objects (an executed aristocrat’s skull), places (the apartment building where most of them live), historical events (from the French Revolution to the Russo-Georgian War), and pure coincidence. An aging upper-crust patriarch burning his letters; a tramp hoping to avoid the advances of a steamroller; an 18th-century nobleman who insists on taking his pipe to the guillotine: Winter Song is a well-stocked encyclopedia of human variety, eccentricity, and folly, elevated by an exquisite cast that include Rufus, Pierre Étaix, and Mathieu Amalric. U.S. Premiere
Tuesday, March 8, 4:00pm
Friday, March 11, 9:15pm
Free Talks – Sponsored by HBO®
Isabelle Huppert
Isabelle Huppert, who co-stars alongside Gérard Depardieu in this year’s Opening Night filmValley of Love, will sit down to discuss her multitudinous career.
Friday, March 4, 5:00pm
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
Melvil Poupaud
Actor-director Melvil Poupaud will talk about his latest role in The Great Game, as well as his collaborations with such visionaries as Raúl Ruiz, Eric Rohmer, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan.
Saturday, March 5, 5:00pm
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
French Touch Composers
Composers Grégoire Hetzel (Summertime), Nicolas Jaar (Dheepan), Morgan Kibby (Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)), Mathieu Lamboley (Lolo), and Mark Snow (best known for The X-Files theme music, as well as his work with Alain Resnais) will discuss their craft. Moderated by Variety’s Elsa Keslassy.
Monday, March 7, 7:30pm
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
French Comedy with Julie Delpy
Writer, director, actor, and composer Julie Delpy—who brings her cross-cultural black comedyLolo to this year’s Rendez-Vous—will sit down to discuss her experiences with humor on both sides of the camera. Moderated by Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek.
Tuesday, March 8, 5:00pm
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
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