The Film Today class and screening series welcomes The Tournées Festival back to CalArts this semester. Sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the festival brings contemporary French cinema to American college and university campuses across the country.
A different film screens every Friday afternoon in CalArts’ Bijou Theater at 4 pm until March 16.
The series includes a wide variety of films that represent the best of contemporary French cinema, spanning generational and geographic borders with a range of genres and subjects. Respected, veteran filmmakers along with first-time directors are featured, showcasing innovations in style and storytelling.
The next films in the series:
- Today (Feb. 17): Le Pere De Mes Enfants (The Father of My Children) – Director: Mia Hansen-Løve – 2009 / 110 min.
Only 30 years old, the prodigiously talented writer-director Mia Hansen- Løve follows her assured 2007 debut, Tout est pardonné (All Is Forgiven), about a drug-addicted dad, with an even more wrenching look at another troubled, charismatic patriarch, inspired by the life and death of French film producer Humbert Balsan
- Feb. 24: L’Illusioniste (The Illusionist) – Director: Sylvain Chomet – 2010 / 80 min.
Sylvain Chomet’s delightful follow-up to 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville is another exquisitely animated film, one based on an unproduced script by the French comic genius Jacques Tati. The Illusionist is set in the early 1960s, the time when Tati wrote the screenplay after his huge success with Mon Oncle (1958).
- March 2, 4 pm: Carlos: Part I – Director: Olivier Assayas – 2010 / Long version (3 Parts): 332 min.
- March 9, 4 pm: Carlos: Part II
- March 16, 4 pm: Carlos: Part III
Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary 330-minute epic about international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sanchéz—better known by his nom de guerre, Carlos the Jackal—is one of the most immersive biopics in cinema history.
The trailer for Le Pere De Mes Enfants (The Father of My Children) is above. Below is a trailer for L’Illusioniste (The Illusionist).
The Tournées Festival
Bijou Theater, CalArts
Fridays until March 16 at 4 pm
Free