Kick off the season with us at our Sunset Soirée at Le Bain! Raise a glass to another year of bold performances, unforgettable films, and vibrant cultural experiences at L’Alliance New York. Be among the first to discover what’s in store, from the Crossing The Line performance festival to new cinema series celebrating Jean-Luc Godard and other groundbreaking filmmakers. For the occasion, legendary New York nightlife icon Susanne Bartsch will make a special appearance on the rooftop, lending her singular downtown glamour to the Sunset Soirée alongside DJs Mikaela and 4AM NYC. Later that evening, the festivities continue downstairs with On Top, Bartsch’s signature party at Le Bain.   

Join us for a fun Sunday in French at our L’Alliance Fall Open House in Montclair! Bring the whole family to explore our engaging classes, hands-on workshops, trial sessions, movie screenings, and exciting door prizes!

Finding the right class is the first step toward learning French with confidence. Throughout the Open House, our experienced teachers will be available to conduct complimentary French placement tests and help you find the program that’s the best fit for you or your child.

Whether you’re just beginning your French journey or have been reading in French for years, our French Book Sale & Book Swap is the perfect place to discover new treasures, share old favorites, and celebrate the joy of French reading.

Snuggle in for a cozy French Storytime celebrating the end of summer, the arrival of autumn, and the excitement of back-to-school season! Designed for children ages 0–6 and their families, this warm and interactive experience welcomes children of all levels of French.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep,” The King and the Mockingbird follows two young protagonists as they flee the clutches of a tyrannical king, aided by an insolent mockingbird. As France’s first drawn animated feature in color, the film has won the admiration of generations of viewers, filmmakers, artists, and illustrators.

Have your child experience the fun of French at the Montclair Campus of L’Alliance New York, with creative workshops featuring interactive activities such as arts and crafts, cooking, and music.

Step into a world of French fun and discover the vibrant spirit of learning at the Montclair Campus of L’Alliance New York, with engaging French trial classes for kids, teens, and adults.

Exclusive to L’Alliance New York members. End the day the French way at our Members-Only Apéro, an evening of conversation, connection, and conviviality bringing together members, teachers, staff, Francophones, and Francophiles in a warm and welcoming atmosphere.

It’s the perfect opportunity to meet our teachers, experience our teaching approach firsthand, and find the class that’s right for your child before enrolling this fall.

Happy Hour, 5:30–7pm

7pm screening introduced and followed by a conversation with Michael Witt, professor and author

Godard’s earliest short 16mm fiction film Une femme coquette (d’après Maupassant) from 1956, based on Maupassant’s ‘Le Signe’ (‘The Signal’), was just the first of his Maupassant inspired projects, both made and unmade. In adapting Maupassant, Godard was following in the footsteps of two filmmakers whom he greatly admired: Jean Renoir and Max Ophuls, who had drawn on the author for Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) and Le Plaisir (1952), respectively. Godard toyed with the idea of remaking Une femme coquette with Anna Karina in 1963. The following year, producers Anatole Dauman and Martin Low proposed that he adapt an erotic short story by Maupassant or the Marquis de Sade, as part of a diptych release in the US with Astruc’s The Crimson Curtain. Dauman acquired the rights to ‘Le Signe’ and Godard envisaged calling his new adaptation Avec le sourire (With a Smile). Although not realized, the project metamorphosed over time into Masculin féminin.

Over the course of his phenomenally productive career, Jean-Luc Godard had hundreds of unmade and abandoned projects. By setting a selection of Godard’s completed films in dialogue with others by him and a range of different directors, this program reveals the vast and varied phantom body of unrealized ventures that lie behind or in the intervals in his completed oeuvre and casts in relief his creative process.

This year’s Crossing The Line festival highlights new collisions and experiments in audience and form, inviting art lovers to experience boundary-breaking visual art, music, film, dance, and theater across New York City and, for the first time in the festival’s history, in upstate New York. Featuring fourteen leading global artists, seven North American premieres and four New York premieres, the festival creates a unique opportunity for New York audiences to engage with thrilling and innovative international performance.

Introduced by Michael Witt, professor and author

This screening puts into practice a radical Godardian proposition: a 35mm projection of both Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her as a single work, their reels and narratives intertwined. One of Godard’s favorite modern authors was William Faulkner, whose work is a recurrent touchstone in his critical writings and films. Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms famously comprises two distinct alternating narrative strands that illuminate each other. Godard proposed projecting his two very different, then most recent features, which he had shot back-to-back, as an integrated work. Presented here for the first time in the US.

Returning to Crossing The Line after Αγρίμι / Fauve in 2024, choreographer Lenio Kaklea continues her exploration of ecology through dance. In The Birds, she takes inspiration from the ways in which birds structure their behavior through dance and song, from mating rituals to hunting patterns. Bright colors, acrobatics and energetic movements contrast with the eerie sense of being watched, as Kaklea questions the precarious equilibrium between freedom and subjugation.

L’Alliance New York continues its Family Saturday series with multidisciplinary arts programming that engages young people and their families through visual art, storytelling, and Francophone cinema. The immersive program features visual arts workshops, story time in French, live theater performances, and film screenings.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep,” The King and the Mockingbird follows two young protagonists as they flee the clutches of a tyrannical king, aided by an insolent mockingbird. As France’s first drawn animated feature in color, the film has won the admiration of generations of viewers, filmmakers, artists, and illustrators.

Discover the joy of chess through this weekly class! Presented in partnership with Story Time Chess and led by a bilingual instructor, young players learn the fundamentals of the game through engaging stories, memorable characters, and interactive activities that make chess fun and accessible.

In this family workshop led by Caroline Garin, founder of KidzArchitects, participants will discover Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille and use the unique design elements in the building to create models of their own. Offered in both French and English, the workshop encourages curiosity, creativity, and language-learning through design.

Mark your calendar — we’re opening our doors for a fun-filled Saturday packed with activities, laughs, and a sneak peek at everything L’Alliance New York has in store this fall!

Step into a world of French fun and discover the vibrant spirit of learning at L’Alliance New York with engaging French trial classes for toddlers, kids, teens, and adults.

Join us at L’Alliance New York’s French library—the largest private French library in the nation!—to explore our extensive book collection, participate in our book exchange and book sale, or enjoy a French story time and coloring activity.

7pm screening introduced and followed by a conversation with Michael Witt, professor and author

Swiss author Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’s writings were central to Godard’s introduction to literature as a child and remained a touchstone for him throughout his career. Ramuz’s books, often set in the Swiss canton of Vaud, have also provided source material for numerous film adaptations, including one of Swiss cinema’s landmark early sound films, the dark Alpine revenge melodrama Rapt. Of Godard’s numerous proposed Ramuz adaptations, he only completed the autobiographical video essay Liberté et patrie, made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville. Inspired by Ramuz’s 1910 novel Aimé Pache, peintre vaudois (‘Aimé Pache, Vaudois painter’), Miéville and Godard appropriated Pache as a means of looking back on their own lives and trajectories.

Bring your toddler to the 2nd floor library for Petits potes, a fun story time in French! Walking and non-walking little ones will enjoy interactive stories, games, and songs, all in a group setting.

Camille Henrot brings her interdisciplinary practice to the stage for the first time, incorporating the stock characters and comic ploys of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building. The delivery of a package triggers a cascade of uncanny events among tenants, as the tragi-comedic play attempts to make sense out of the senseless.

Spark your imagination at our Studio in a School art workshops, featuring exciting new themes every month!

The principle of ‘remaking’ was central to Godard’s work. As he put it in relation to Breathless: ‘What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done.’ It is a concept he revisited almost six decades later in The Image Book, the opening section of which is titled simply ‘Remakes’. In the early 2000s, Godard expressed a desire to make a contemporary version of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), planning to cast Maurice Pialat in the role played by Michel Simon in the earlier adaptation.

Introduced and book signing of Across the Movi-Verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021 with J. Hoberman

To celebrate the publication of Across the Movi-verse, a brand-new anthology of J. Hoberman’s previously uncollected essays, tributes, reviews and ruminations from his post-Village Voice career, on subjects including the films of the Obama era, film maudit, Chantal Akerman, and Triumph of the Will, L’Alliance New York welcomes the legendary critic to present Jean Rouch’s seminal feature Moi, un noir, considered by Jean-Luc Godard to be “The greatest French film since the Liberation.”

This site-specific performance brings together dancers Asha Thomas and Robert Cornejo to present excerpts of Gounouj In Situ, a work by choreographer Léo Lérus inspired by the natural beauty of his native Guadeloupe and the island’s resilient ability to adapt to the impact of human activity. The dancers’ movement mirrors the complex mix of feelings around environmental preservation, juxtaposing disappointment and anger with an enduring hope and a shared movement toward a positive future.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, Godard had a series of unrealized projects with Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Marcel Ophuls relating to the Holocaust, Jewishness and Palestine–Israel. He also had several related solo ventures, including a contemporary version of Vercors’ 1942 World War II novel Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea), which Jean-Pierre Melville had adapted as his first feature. In Godard’s planned film, to be called Le Silence de la terre (The Silence of the Earth), the action was to be transposed from occupied France to occupied Palestine. Although he abandoned this project, it informed his luminous 2004 Sarajevo-set feature Notre musique (Our Music). This program also includes the stunning short film that Godard made in 1993 in protest at the refusal of European governments to take action over the siege of Sarajevo, Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Hail Sarajevo, 1993).

A Latin expression, literally meaning “in accordance with one’s wishes or until satiety,” Ad Libitum is a piece about the desire to create, to step outside oneself, to expand. Dancer Simon Le Borgne and musician Ulysse Zangs explore the idea of molting, of emptying yourself through dance and live music. Driven by a musical score of drums, electric guitar and synths, the performance expresses the need to change skin and shed all substance, as well as the need to embody yourself, to fill your own container.

This special screening explores Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking approach to filmmaking through his innovative ‘audiovisual scripts’ – experimental video notebooks that replace the traditional written screenplay. Focusing on his acclaimed film Passion, the program spans work from 1981 to 2006, bringing together rare test footage, preparatory video scripts, the remarkable video essay he made afterwards, and the short film he eventually made from the test footage. This constellation of material offers a unique insight into how Godard developed ideas through audiovisual collages of image, text and sound, blending cinema, painting, and experimentation.

Contrary to what one might conclude based on how few plays Godard adapted as films, he was deeply interested in the theater and had numerous unrealized theatrical projects over his career. René Allio, whom Godard interviewed for Cahiers, ventured into filmmaking from theater, and his first feature La Vieille dame indigne (The Shameless Old Lady) is a beautifully observed, gently subversive adaptation of a Brecht short story, featuring Sylvie (real name Louise Pauline Mainguené) as a widow determined to enjoy her remaining years to the full. Godard’s wide-ranging exploration of theater in the 1960s culminated in La Chinoise (1967), a film that exemplifies his desire in this period to combine and blend theatrical and cinematic forms. ‘One should make theater in the cinema’, as he put it, ‘mix things up’.

Dancer and choreographer Liz Santoro recounts her life onstage. Some memories are real, others are generated by artificial intelligence; some movements originate from her body, others are fabricated by an algorithm trained on her dancing. This Is Unreal constructs a hybrid world which asks: Where does the body end and the machine begin?

A digital reconstruction by Michael Witt of a remarkable montage film created by Godard at the 1981 Rotterdam Film Festival from his film Sauve qui peut (la vie) and reels from four other films: Old and New (aka The General Line) by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov (1929), Cops by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton (1922), La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti (1948), and Man of Marble by Andrzej Wajda (1977). This montage film, which Godard titled Sauve la vie (qui peut), was screened just once and seen by only a handful of people. It constituted an extension of his wide-ranging experimentation with the juxtaposition of film reels during his exploratory lectures on cinema history in Montreal and Rotterdam in 1978 and 1980-1981, respectively, and anticipated his later videographic montage practice, which would culminate in Histoire(s) du cinéma.

Toi, moi, Tituba… is based on French philosopher Elsa Dorlin’s essay on Maryse Condé’s heroine Tituba. As a Black woman and so-called witch, Tituba gives a voice to those who are silenced by force. Inspired by this story, Dorothée Munyaneza uses her own body as an archive, and with composer Khyam Allami, presents a multiplicity of silenced voices and perspectives to revive memories and celebrate them through dance and music.

A narrator begins reading Claude Ponti’s Mille secrets de poussins, but things don’t go as planned… Full of mischief, the poussins (chicks) have hidden themselves in the library and start popping out of the books to play tricks on him. Accompanied by animated videos and multimedia effects, the performer leads the audience into a playful world.

When a mysterious criminal threatens New York City, an injured police detective finds an unlikely ally in Leo, a hospitalized boy with a remarkable secret: he can leave his body and drift unseen through the city as a phantom. Phantom Boy’s hand-drawn animation gives an otherworldly quality to this noir-inspired story, transforming the city into a luminous set of glowing lights and shifting perspectives.

Choreographer François Chaignaud and beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux engage in a percussive duel. Through their voices, feet, arms, props and costumes, the artists create a duet that is as uncategorizable as the word mirliton (which ranges in definition from a kid’s flute to a style of military hat).

In adaku, part 2, sweat variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, continues a speculative trilogy exploring one family’s entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade, set in a near-future United States. At the crossroads of dance, theater, and visual arts, this piece invites audiences into cycles of ritual and repair.

Visionary playwright and director Tiago Rodrigues returns to Crossing The Line for the third year in a row with an urgent, unforgettable new work exploring separation, communication, and the consequences of our decisions. As humanity struggles to survive on Earth in 2077, a daughter chooses life in exile on Mars, leaving her father behind to grapple with love, loss, and the challenge of maintaining connections across unnavigable distances.

Making its English-language premiere, this one-woman piece is a collaboration between renowned French playwright Pascal Rambert and actress Pauline Chalamet. The play follows a young woman with a Master’s degree, who is—temporarily—a window cleaner, as she expresses her anger at social stratification and grapples with loneliness.

Part ritual, part concert, part theatrical assembly, Nexus de l’adoration gathers song, speech, choreography, and devotion into a vivid ceremony for a fractured contemporary world. Paying homage to our world’s fascinating and expansive diversity, nine officiants sing, dance and speak in a hybrid liturgy for our time.

Mary Anning recounts the remarkable true story of a 12-year-old fossil hunter who discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton. Anning would go on to become a pioneering figure in English paleontology, overcoming the limited opportunities afforded to women in the 19th century.

Returning after the sold-out US Premiere of LACRIMA during last year’s Crossing The Line, Caroline Guiela Nguyen conjures up a vision of France as it exists beyond the limits it has been given, beyond its own borders. Set between 1990s France and 1950s Vietnam, Saigon unfolds in a vibrant restaurant where people gather to rebuild fragments of their lives across generations and continents.

In a remote, excessively strict boarding school in postwar France, musician Clément Mathieu starts a choir and attempts to change the school’s outdated policies. Faced with resistance from both faculty and students, Mathieu’s quiet encouragement eventually wins the hearts of his pupils.