The 28th Annual Festival of Films in French

Union Cinema

The Festival of Films in French returns this February with an array of contemporary and classic fiction, animation and documentary films that attend to their very form and explore notions of care, restoration and reparations, whether physical, familial, historical, environmental or symbolic. Filmed by familiar and new directors, the stories travel from Paris to Benin or the Niger Delta, Quebec to Provence, Haiti to the Congo/DRC, and are set in Mauritius, Tunisia, Iraq, France and California.

Free

Dahomey

Union Cinema

Twenty-six royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? While the soul of the artifacts is freed, debate rages among students of the University of Abomey-Calavi.

Free

Tehachapi

Union Cinema

French visual artist-director JR (co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary FACES PLACES with the legendary Agnès Varda) situates his latest social-art intervention in a Southern Californian supermax prison, where he has imagined an enormously ambitious collaboration with the facility’s inmates.

Free

L’Inhumaine

Union Cinema

Live musical accompaniment by Renato Umali. Claire Lescot is a famous first lady. All men want to be loved by her and among them is the young scientist Einar Norsen. When she mocks at him, he leaves her house with the declared intention to kill himself.

Free

Bergers (Shepherds)

Union Cinema

Bergers, by French-Canadian filmmaker Sophie Deraspe, tells the story of Mathyas, a burned-out advertising executive from Montreal who moves to Provence to become a shepherd. Winner of Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

Free

Boléro

Union Cinema

In 1928 Paris, choreographer Ida Rubinstein commissions Maurice Ravel to compose the music for her next ballet. Facing a crisis of inspiration, the composer revisits his life and dedicates himself to create a universal masterpiece, Bolero.

Free

Experimental Tuesdays presents: James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Union Cinema

Raised in Maine and currently based in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union, Wilkins has carved out a body of moving image work that combines conceptual rigor, an unerring ability to locate the uncanny in the everyday, and a bone-dry wit. A downloadable PDF of a public hearing in Alleghany, New York; a mysterious videotape that becomes the center of a detective yarn; reflections on the history of the toxic Androscoggin River; or 35mm publicity stills scoured from movie studio press kits… in Wilkins’s able hands these things act as launching pads for freewheeling, rhizomatic meditations on the photographed image, representations of race, the history of Hollywood, and American life as lived under late capitalism. A curated selection of the work to date of an enormously original and utterly unclassifiable talent.

Free

Bushman

Union Cinema

In 1968, Peace Corps veteran David Schickele enlisted his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam to star in a light-hearted comedy about the adventures of a young Nigerian intellectual in San Francisco. Using a docufictional style reminiscent of Cassavetes' Shadows, the film observes the foibles of late 1960s African-American culture with an outsider's incisive eye. The result is a vibrant snapshot of the nation's racial politics, from interracial romance to cross-cultural misunderstandings and countercultural joy. The film morphs into a documentary when the director's voice abruptly intrudes to narrate its star’s enraging fate: Okpokam was accused of a crime he did not commit and was thrown in prison before being expelled from the country.

$5

Lost Boys, Stolen Trucks

Union Cinema

Lost Boys, Stolen Trucks is a program of short films by Iowa filmmakers Philip Rabalais and Auden Lincoln-Vogel. Made between 2017 and 2024, these four films about the absurdity of boys trace an artistic collaboration between two filmmakers who continually steal each others’ ideas, whose themes and characters get lost, cropping up years later in the other’s films. Centering around trucks as objects of desire (and anxiety), as vehicles of escape (and destruction), these four films explore dynamics of male friendship (and enmity) through surreal and genre-bending forms.

$5

The Heartland

Union Cinema

Highlighting both the joys and trials of growing up Black in the Midwest, three young Milwaukee residents confront and reconcile the unrequited love between them and their city. Through outspoken interviews, they reveal the ways in which Milwaukee has shaped them and they in turn have shaped Milwaukee. Graced with poetry and luminous images, Marquise Mays's heartfelt documentary takes an at once loving and critical look at a city still riven by inequality-while offering an empowering vision for a brighter future.

Free

George Washington

Union Cinema

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast. George Washington is a startling and distinct work of contemporary American independent cinema.

Free