The most thrilling actor of his generation, Patrick Dewaere was a blazing comet that streaked across French cinema all too briefly. Films in the second part of this tribute include André Téchiné’s Hôtel des Amériques, with Catherine Deneuve; the scandalous Beau-père; and F as in Fairbanks, opposite real-life partner Miou-Miou. 

At the intersection of steamy romance and eccentric comedy, Plein Sud features Dewaere as a married professor who drops everything to follow a bombshell to Barcelona. There’s only one problem: outside of sexual chemistry, the couple have nothing in common. 

This touching drama by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), based on the 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg, follows a poor Polish couple whose rescue of a baby thrown from a train en route to Auschwitz changes their lives forever.

Seven teams of 4th-year students from Brassart-MOPA school in France will have a chance to show their creativity by making very short films, about 20 seconds each, to be screened before features and shorts programs at Animation First.

These eclectic programs bring together the best and latest animated shorts from emerging and established filmmakers with selections from lauded international festivals. These films are in competition for Animation First Festival’s Best New Francophone Short award.

Join us in L’Alliance New York’s Library throughout the festival for virtual reality experiences from French studios and distributors, including Ito Meikyū by Boris Labbé, Grand Prize winner at Venice Film Festival.

Director Claude Barras’ enchanting stop-motion ecological tale centers on Kéria, her adopted baby orangutan Oshi, and her cousin Selaï, who must fight back against the planned destruction of Borneo’s ancestral forest. Brought to life by Barras’ intricately crafted puppets, the story unfolds against the rich backdrops of the island’s tropical trees, plants, and rivers.

This curated selection of shorts highlights the greatest from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, including a tailor-made opening sequence by students from GOBELINS Paris.

The second film adaptation by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, co-creators of the best-selling comic book series Asterix, brings iconic duo Asterix and Obelix to the big screen in this newly restored version. The story follows Asterix and Obelix as they take on twelve challenges from Julius Caesar that could win them the Roman Empire.

In this animated musical adventure, Yuku embarks on a daring quest to find the legendary Himalayan flower said to radiate eternal light, hoping it will restore her grandmother’s health. To reach the flower, she must head out on a perilous quest into the mountains, armed only with her ukulele and songs.

Betrand Dezoteux’s vivid imagination follows Jesus Perez’s visit to an unknown planet with very unusual hybrid inhabitants that embody a colorful, yet unsettling aesthetic.

Discover the work of Gisèle and Nag Ansorge, two pioneers of Swiss animation who developed sand animation to create an original and mesmerizing body of shorts.

Nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, for Best Animated Feature, this film follows a young boy who, after losing his mother, is sent to an orphanage where he begins to learn the meaning of trust and true love.

Directed by visionary science-fiction animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) and designed by the legendary Jean Giraud (Mœbius) The Time Masters is a visually fantastic foray into existentialist space adventure.

These eclectic programs bring together the best and latest animated shorts from emerging and established filmmakers with selections from lauded international festivals. These films are in competition for Animation First Festival’s Best New Francophone Short award.

This program of shorts puts the spotlight on the work of award-winning Swiss filmmaker and editor Marina Rosset, along with selected works from her contemporaries. A mid-career artist, Rosset has created poetic, magical and stunningly beautiful films. Together, the program speaks to the originality of Rosset’s work and the wealth of contemporary Swiss animation.

Progressive in its day and still affecting now, Claude Miller’s debut feature about repression and forbidden yearning stars Patrick Dewaere and Patrick Bouchitey as rival summer-camp counselors in 1960. When the macho Marc (Dewaere) catches the more sensitive Philippe (Bouchitey) in drag one night, he begins to aggressively torment him—but is it out of disgust or desire?

In this chilling take on the cinema of paranoia, Dewaere plays a journalist who discovers he has been manipulated to cover up a French politician’s murder. His quest for truth soon leads to an American corporation with a dirty past.

In her newest film, Lisa Immordino Vreeland explores the working life of Jean Cocteau, focusing on his remarkable artistic output as a filmmaker, writer and painter.  Rich with archival footage, and narrated by Josh O’Connor, the film is a deserved tribute to a master.  “A definitive, hypnotic and poignant vision of the man… Essential.” – Alexander Payne

The third and final collaboration of Dewaere and arch-provocateur Bertrand Blier is the story of a man who becomes romantically involved with his girlfriend’s teenage daughter after her mother’s death. Surprisingly complex and ambiguous, the film is as much about mourning and loss as about transgression, while retaining Blier’s trademark black humor.

Dewaere’s flair for physical comedy shines in his performance as the boxer in Dugowson’s debut film, virtually unknown in the US. A romp through French class and gender relations in the 1970s, co-starring Dewaere’s real-life partner Miou-Miou. 

Dewaere and Dugowson’s second collaboration returns to the social commentary of Lily aime-moi, focusing on unemployment through the tribulations of a man in a series of routine jobs. Dewaere’s descent into madness here culminates with one of the most arresting examples of his no-holds-barred, emotionally raw performance style—which was shot without a stunt man. 

In 1968, Lee Breuer and members of his legendary downtown experimental theater group, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted film in Paris.  Abandoned and unseen, the footage was resurrected by Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin who assembled it into a new work that retains the spirit of his father and his circle. 

Ophüls takes on the oft-adapted Guy de Maupassant, presenting three of his tales addressing the pitfalls of pleasure that can accompany aging, distance, boredom, and obsession, and featuring a cast of French acting royalty that includes Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon, all wondrously captured by the director’s characteristically ever-roaming camera. 35mm print courtesy of Institut Français.

L’Alliance presents a small selection of film adaptations of works by Guy de Maupassant, the father of the modern short story and one of the greatest French writers of the nineteenth century.

Adapted from de Maupassant’s novella of the same name, a delicate family drama of an unhappy marriage, the arrival of a possible new love, and the confused parentage that tends to result. Directed by André Cayette (Anatomy of a Marriage) whose work continues to offer revelations long underseen in the US.

A gang of small–time criminals stage a daring heist against a mysterious tycoon and pay the consequences in this banlieue thriller as taut as the best of Jean-Pierre Melville and an incisive analysis of contemporary class relations and circulation of capital. 

In Alexandre Astruc’s bleak, painterly period drama, adapted from Guy de Maupassant’s debut 1883 novel, starry-eyed aristocrat Jeanne (Maria Schell) is so smitten with the fetching yet destitute Julien (Christian Marquand) that it takes many years and a child together to see that the philandering scoundrel was just after her money. 35mm print courtesy of Institut Français.