THE FRENCH MOVIES AT THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONALFILM FESTIVAL 2018
The highly anticipated San Francisco International Film Festival revealed its line up for its 61st edition. The Festival always offer a great selection of French movies. You won't be disappointed. We are not.. so not!
Held each Spring for 15 days, the SFIFF (April 4 to 17, 2018) is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation. The selection is outstanding... as usual! And we love the French one... as always.
Le Grand Méchant Renard et autres contes...
(The Big Bad Fox and other tales...)
The idyllic image of life on the farm has been disrupted in Benjamin Renner (co-director, Ernest & Celestine, Festival 2013) and Patrick Imbert’s delightful hand-drawn creation about a misfit group of barnyard animals and their mischievous hijinks. There’s enough action and madcap humor here to bring back memories of the zaniest Looney Tunes cartoons, but buried just beneath the fun lies a sweet core that will melt the heart of the most cynical audience member. Recommended for ages 8 and up (ages 5 and up for French speakers).
Sunday, April 8 at the Castro > Buy your tickets
Le Redoutable
(Godard Mon Amour)
At a defining moment in New Wave provocateur Jean-Luc Godard’s artistic life when the didactic La Chinoise (1967) marked a shift in style as radical as his politics, the 37-year-old filmmaker also fell in love with his 20-year-old leading lady Anne Wiazemsky. Louis Garrel inhabits the auteur’s pugnacious soul as he embraces the protests sweeping France and embarks on a tempestuous second marriage. Writer/director Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist, 2011) pays homage to Godard’s genius even as he cheekily sends up the director’s excesses and pretensions.
April 14 and 15 > Buy your tickets
GAUGUIN - VOYAGE TO TAHITI
The post-Impressionist painter’s first trip to French Polynesia in 1891 is the focus of this lush, semi-fictionalized biographical exploration of art and inspiration. Flush with the idea of new freedoms, Henri Gauguin (a magnetic Vincent Cassel) abandons his family and a drab Paris and sets off for Tahiti. There, he discovers both inspiration and uncertainly in Tehura, a younger islander who consents to his advances when her parents offer her to the artist as a wife.
April 6 and April 8 > Buy your tickets
L'ATELIER
(The Workshop)
On France's Mediterranean coast, a workshop led by Olivia (Marina Foïs), an author of popular thrillers, gathers six local students of varying backgrounds to communally craft a book suggested by their personal experiences. As outlier Antoine, who hands in increasingly violent texts for writing samples, comes into tense conflict with Olivia and other members of the group, the film uses his feelings of disenfranchisement to explore the fraught divisions in present-day French society. From the Palme d’Or-winning director of The Class (2008), Laurent Cantet.
April 5, 7 and 8 > Buy your tickets
L'EAU FROIDE
(Cold Water)
French teens in the early '70s were coming out of a particularly turbulent period of civil unrest when thousands of students and workers took to the Paris streets. In this early masterpiece set in 1972, revered French filmmaker Olivier Assayas tells the story of a directionless young couple who find themselves at an all-night house party. This lengthy party sequence has been justly celebrated as an outstanding example of mise en scène and evocative use of music and helped establish Assayas as one of the finest filmmakers of our time.
April 9 at the SFMOMA > Buy your tickets
Take a look by yourself...
... at the whole French selection. > here
... at the ''whole whole'' selection. > there
Movies will be showing in different venues such as the Castro Theeatre of course, the New Mission Theatre (Alamo Drafthouse), but also the Vogue Theatre, the Roxie Theater and and the Victoria in the Mission...
SFIFF 2018
San Francisco International Film Festival
April 4 to 17, 2018
