The 25th Festival of Films in French is back in the cinema this February 11-20, 2022.
Please comply with UWM’s covid measures for the safety and well-being of everyone in the Student Union and the Union cinema.Masks are required at all times during the projection of all the films and during the talkbacks.All food (snacks, popcorn, etc.) and drinks are prohibited at this time in the Student Union cinema.
Join us in person for the 25th Annual Festival of Films in French which resolutely showcases films about women and by women. Celebrating world-cinema in French, this edition of nine films highlights women’s artistry, their societal and familial roles, their activism and engagement with others, their sense of social and environmental justice, and recognizes the directors who bring these generations of women and actresses to the silver screen.
The first weekend spotlights the rich diversity of Quebec’s fecund cinema, featuring Je m’appelle Humain , the moving life journey of Innu poet, Josephine Bacon captured in poetry by documentarist Kim O’Bomsawin along the trail of the Master of the Caribou as she bears witness and seeks to keep alive her language, culture, and traditions.
Nin e tepueian – Mon cri focuses on the next generation of Innu activists, in the person of Natasha Kanapé Fontaine whose own passionate voice interrogates the longstanding racist disregard of indigenous peoples.
Strong female characters take the lead in La langue est donc une histoire d’amour as immigrants to Montreal share heartrending stories with their French language teacher, and in Antigone , whose eponymous young Algerian immigrant character is caught up in a modern tragedy that pits love of family against the cold rule of law in a struggle that is largely played out on social media.
Following on from the women’s difficult survival stories in the context of climate change tenderly recorded in Marcher sur l’eau , Alice Diop’s juxtaposition of History and individualized stories conjugates their pluralities together with the spaces they occupy along the RER B in her finely tuned contemporary documentary Nous .
Mati Diop is both daughter to Lionel the sensitive RER conductor caught in the tracks that their quotidian has ritualized in Claire Denis’ 35 rhums and the first Black woman director selected for Cannes’ main competition for her 2019 Atlantique , a haunted feature-length fiction about the young women left behind in Dakar as their male partners and family members depart clandestinely in precarious crafts for other shores.
Ending the Festival is Germaine Acogny, the doyenne of Contemporary African Dance who is seen (after her cameo appearance as Tanam in Yao ), in Iya Tundé, la mère est revenue , Laure Malécot’s documentary about the dancer-choreographer’s own life practice and titled eponymously after her 2015 historical and familial solo.
Come in from the cold and behold the cinematography of this year’s selection once again on the big screen!