French Film Festival celebrates 20th anniversary

The French are still masters when it comes to both serious drama and light comedy on screen. The best recent movies from France will be shown from March 15-25 at the French Film Festival, which is celebrating its 20th year.

The festival will take place at the cinematheques in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Herzliya, Sderot and Rosh Pina and will present over a dozen new movies, along with a restored classic. The festival was created by Eden Cinema Ltd. in collaboration with Unifrance, the French Embassy in Israel and the Institut Francais. It is run by Eden’s CEO, Carolyn Boneh and the artistic director of the festival is Guillaume Mainguet, the attaché for cinema and audio-visual affairs at the Institut Francais in Tel Aviv.

The guests will include Gad Elmaleh, whose latest film, Stay with Us (Reste Un Peu), will be the opening movie. Moroccan-born Elmaleh is a famous standup comic in France and his attempt to conquer the US comedy scene became the basis for a Netflix comedy series, Huge in France.

In Stay with Us, the Jewish comedian has made a semi-autobiographical film, poking gentle fun at the spiritual quest inspired by his time in America, where he became interested in converting to Catholicism. This decision, not surprisingly, devastates his traditional parents, who play themselves in the movie, when he returns to Paris to tell them about it.

It all plays out a little like the sequence in Hannah and Her Sisters where the character played by Woody Allen dabbles in various religions, including Christianity. Stay with Us will be released in theaters throughout Israel on March 23 by Lev Cinemas.

Dany Boon, another French actor known for comedy, stars in Driving Madeleine, a movie by Christian Carion. It tells the story of an elderly woman who hires a cab driver to take her across Paris, where she remembers important moments in her life. Line Renaud, who was 92 when the film was made, portrays Madeleine.

MANY OF the films in the festival have won Cesar Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, as well as prizes from film festivals around the world. Full Time won awards for Eric Gravel for Best Director and Laure Calamy for Best Actress at the Venice International Film Festival. It tells the story of a single mother working as a hotel maid who gets an interview for her dream job just as a national transit strike wreaks havoc with the public transit system.

Calamy is best known outside of France for her role as the delightfully nutty assistant in love with her boss on Call My Agent!

Emmanuel Mouret’s Diary of a Fleeting Affair stars Sandrine Kiberlain (Black Tide, Another World) in the story of a single mother having an affair with a married man. Mouret made the film, The Things We Say, the Things We Do.

Other featured films 

Many of the movies in this year’s festival feature stories of children and parents. Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children stars two of France’s most popular actors, Virginia Efira (Benedetta, Victoria) and Roschdy Zem (Omar Killed Me, Chocolate), in a story of a childless teacher who becomes close to her boyfriend’s young daughter.

Julien Rambaldi’s The Nannies is a comedy that stars Eye Haidara as a woman on the run from gangsters who gets a job as a nanny in one of the most chic neighborhoods in Paris and ends up fighting for better working conditions for caregivers. It looks at the reality behind the liberal elite’s slogans about equality.

Leopold Legrand’s The Sixth Child tells the story of a couple struggling financially who have five children and a sixth on the way and how they enter into an almost unthinkable bargain when they meet a well-to-do couple who can’t have children.

Olivier Peyon’s adaptation of a novel by Philippe Besson, Lie with Me, tells the story of a novelist who returns to his hometown and meets his first love after many years and gets to know her child.

The classic movie that is being revived this year is Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country, which tells the story of a painter and his relationship with his family.