CineSalon

    L’Alliance Recommends: A French Film, Novel, and Music Pick for Summer

    June 6, 2024

    The team at L’Alliance is always quick to recommend their favorites in francophone entertainment, so we’re sharing the love by regularly bringing you their latest selections right here. Whether you want an absorbing read to tuck into your beach bag, you’re looking for a thought-provoking movie to watch over a long weekend, or you need a new musician’s discography to soundtrack your next road trip, this standout French film, book, and singer-songwriter will capture your attention while deepening your language practice.

    French Film: Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul)

    Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou’s acclaimed 2022 film was one of L’Alliance’s programming features for our May and June CinéSalon series dedicated to Chou’s works and curated selections. Return to Seoul won several major international prizes, and was nominated for Un Certain Regard at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and for Best International Film at the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards, and was shortlisted for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.

    The narrative follows twenty-five-year-old Freddie (Ji-Min Park) who, on an impulse to reconnect with her roots, travels to South Korea—her birthplace before she was adopted and raised in France. Freddie is headstrong and wildly independent, but she’s also harboring a deep longing, which is the impetus of the trip: she’s decided to seek out her biological parents. The film—filled with fish-out-of-water experiences, uncomfortable truths, and righteous anger—explores how Freddie grapples with her tenuous connections to family, identity, and culture. The film is loosely based on the life of Chou’s friend Laure Badufle—the idea for the narrative was sparked when Chou witnessed Badufle’s initial meeting with her biological father.

    The New York Times called Return to Seoul “…a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.” Sight & Sound said, “It is in that gap—between self-protection and exposure; between theory and reality—that this spirited, stimulating film finds its resonance.” We hope you are touched by it as well!

    French Novel: The Postcard (La Carte Postale)

    Paris-based author Anne Berest’s critically-beloved autofiction release sold over 150,000 copies in France, won the first U.S. Goncourt Prize in 2022, the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens in 2021, and 2022’s Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE, and was named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, NPR, The Globe and Mail, Library Journal, and many others. Coinciding with the US release last year, we were so pleased to welcome Anne Berest to Montclair, NJ last year for a conversation about The Postcard.

    Called a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review and “A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy” in Vogue, the narrative uses Berest’s own family history as a jumping-off point to create “un roman vrai” (“a true novel”). It begins when an anonymous postcard is sent to the Berest home, bearing only the names of her maternal great-grandparents and their children—all of whom died in Auschwitz in 1942. The novel folds in decades of research to solve the mystery of who sent the note, and why. Through Berest’s investigation, she reconstruct’s her family’s journey from Russia to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, explores twentieth-century Parisian life, and attempts to understand what it means to be Jewish.

    Suzanne Zudick, L’Alliance’s Vice President of Marketing & Communications, enjoyed the novel in the original French and feels it’d be a comfortable read for the B2 or C1 level. “I found myself thinking about it for days and weeks afterwards,” Suzanne says. “It was so moving. One, it’s a lesson of how you often end up being defined by the way others perceive you, as opposed to what you find most interesting or important about yourself. Two, it’s such a human and unflinching description of the Holocaust—for those who died and those who survived, for the victims, oppressors, and everyone in between. And three, it underscores the power of trauma across generations. I was so touched by this book, especially to read it in the original French, about events taking place in France.”

    French Musician: Aya Nakamura

    Nakamura—a multi-platinum French-Malian singer-songwriter—has sold over one million copies of her second album, 2018’s NAKAMURA, worldwide. She’s also the most popular female Francophone singer on Spotify; in 2020 NAKAMURA passed one billion streams. She’s had five number one hit songs in France, has received several Victoires de la Musique awards, an NRJ Music Award, an Apple Music Award, and has been nominated for countless others, including MTV Europe Music Awards and All Africa Music Awards.

    Her music transcends genre by combining elements of R&B, Afrobeats, and pop—she also deftly incorporates French argot (syllabic slang) into her lyrics. Nakamura immigrated to France as a child and was raised in the suburbs of Paris; her family hails from a long line of griot (West African storytellers) in Bamako, Mali, and she calls on both of these influences through her songs, using Arabic, West African, and English dialects. We’d recommend diving in with her most popular album, NAKAMURA, and then starting from the beginning with 2017’s Journal intime—this way you’ll understand the context within which she rose to fame through early hits including “Karma” and “J’ai mal.” Move on to 2020’s double-platinum AYA and 2023’s DNK, and you’ll be caught up—and hooked.

    Nakamura recently made headlines when it was rumored that President of France Emmanuel Macron considered inviting her to perform an Édith Piaf song at the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympics. The reporting resulted in far-right protests and racist backlash—it also sparked a larger conversation about how France is torn between defining its identity as a melting pot of modernity versus a bastion of tradition. Press play on Nakamura’s music and you’ll find that she represents the country’s future.

    For more entertainment delights à la française, follow L’Alliance’s monthly CinéSalon series programming for the best of Francophone and French films, search our library catalog for your next favorite French novel, and discover new streaming French music in our Culturetèque Digital Library.

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