UWM Union Theatre presents
The 15th Annual Festival of Films in French
In memory of Dr. Sheldon Stone

February 3-12, 2012

All films are in French and other languages w/English Subtitles. Talkbacks follow certain screenings. All films are FREE! 

The 15th Annual Festival of Films in French celebrates the wide range of French-language cinema. The fourteen films, most of them Milwaukee Premieres, take us to Quebec, Burkina Faso, Corsica, the French provinces, Paris, Moscow, and more. The Festival opens with an espionage thriller, L'affaire Farewell, and ends with a beautiful animated thriller set on the rooftops of Paris, Une vie de chat, screened in Milwaukee for the first time in its original version. The festival highlights strong films by four women filmmakers, Caroline Bottaro, Mia Hansen-Løve, Coline Serreau, Roselyn Bosch, exploring class differences, family dramas, the environment, and revisiting tragic events in history. There is plenty of comedy as well: Ricardo Trogi's 1981, about the growing pains of tweens in Quebec; Dao Abdoulaye's Une femme pas comme les autres, turning the tables on polygamy; New Wave master Alain Renais' latest film, the surreal romantic comedy Les Herbes folles; and François Ozon's 1977-set Potiche, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. As a double feature, we pair Ozon's 2010 comedy with the first film that Deneuve and Depardieu made together, in 1980, François Truffaut's somber Le Dernier métro, set in Paris during the German occupation. Racial hatred in France during World War II is explored further in two other films based on historical documents, La Rafle, the Vel' d'Hiv roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942, and Les amants de l'ombre, prohibited love between African-American GIs and French women during the Liberation of France. The Festival continues its tradition of silent films with live musical accompaniment with Louis Delluc's memorable experiment in impressionist cinema, La femme de nulle part. Made in 1922 it has never before shown in the U.S.