La Petite Galerie is a place for children and families to explore, imagine, and create together. Surrounded by the enchanting world of Elene Usdin’s paintings, visitors are invited to pick up a book, draw, watch a film, play, or simply take a moment to relax and observe.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The third annual edition of Version Restaurée continues to spotlight newly restored Francophone films making their US or New York premieres at L’Alliance New York. Highlights include Agnès Jaoui’s modern classic The Taste of Others (Le goût des autres, 2000); Delphine Seyrig in The Garden That Tilts (Le Jardin qui bascule, dir. Guy Gilles, 1974); and Claude Chabrol’s peak-Nouvelle Vague dramedy Les Godelureaux (The Wise Guys, 1961).

Idle-rich Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy) is shamed by the harmless antics of student Arthur (Charles Belmont) and resolves to get even with him, enlisting sparky Ambroisine (Bernadette Lafont) to assist. Arthur falls for her—and the duo’s deception—resulting in a typically freewheeling Nouvelle Vague jaunt but with substantial sinister vibes.

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.

Ben Hecht’s farce (based on his 1944 novel) plays on the frantic nature of early ’40s Hollywood-spectacle moviemaking by injecting it with an old-fashioned, behind-the-scenes murder mystery. When the lead actor of a Gone with the Wind–sized production turns up dead, a fast-talking—and star-studded—whodunit representative of the era begins to unfold.

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.

A killer-for-hire (Patrick Jouané) on assignment at a lush lakeside home becomes passionately entangled with his latest hit (the luminous Delphine Seyrig), seriously complicating his mission. Undercelebrated auteur Guy Gilles’s ’70s-chic mood piece and visual feast serves up a cheery summery vibe with a chilly undercurrent of murder.

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 late 19th-century London, headstrong young Esther Kahn (Summer Phoenix), stifled by her poverty-stricken Jewish existence, sees the theater stage as a vehicle for escape. Arnaud Desplechin’s third feature, his first in English, presents an ambitious portrait of an ingénue searching for herself through the art of acting that’s both quietly contemplative and unsettlingly tense. A key work of the first quarter of the 21st century.

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.

For the first of his three directorial features, Nolot also penned the semi-autobiographical script and stars as Jacqui, the middle-aged actor returned to his past: a place and family unseen for a decade. This homecoming to see his dying mother also stirs up deep-rooted emotions and startling truths about his upbringing.

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.

Lucy Sante introduces two films explored in her recent essay collection My Heart & I Agree. Guy Debord’s 1979 film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni recapitulates his ideas on society, images, and consumerism, and glides into an autumnal reflection on the Paris of his youth. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air (2012), likewise rueful but resolute, is a younger generation’s view of the disillusionment following May 1968, when revolution failed to occur, but youth persisted.

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.

Aboard the SS France during a lush Mediterranean cruise, prolific cinema verité master François Reichenbach (the “indiscreet” of the title) films its passengers. Some are real tourists, others are actors/models, making for a docufiction that is both a gorgeous travelogue and a somewhat menacing trip into voyeurism.

A highly unpopular boarding school teacher with a glass eye, unkempt beard, and odd smell—whose nickname, slang for “codfish,” shares the film’s title—is put in charge of the boys left behind over Christmas. Full of Pagnolian humanity, this delicate holiday tale served as the inspiration for Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

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.

Bellon’s three-part television series, broadcast in October 1974, consists of three films exploring the African religions brought to Brazil through the transatlantic slave trade in previous centuries, with Pierre Verger serving as producer and writing the commentary.

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.

In Agnès Jaoui’s witty, bittersweet film—an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film and winner of four Césars—a discontented, married industrialist (Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui’s life and creative partner who co-wrote this script) meets an actress (who’s also his new English teacher) and unexpectedly finds fresh spring in his step.

Obie Award-winning director Philippe Quesne brings his latest work, Le Paradoxe de John, to L’Alliance New York as part of Under the Radar Festival. Using humor, care, and melancholy, Quesne presents a slightly offbeat community exploring the role of art and poetry in our everyday lives as they construct an art gallery in an apartment. With ghostly animated objects, striking effects, musical inventions, atmospheric composition, and foam sculptures, a humorous world unfolds on the stage.