Presented by the Department of French and Francophone Studies (Brown University) at ​Avon Cinema.

1995-2025: our festival is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year.

Thirty years of bringing the best of French and Francophone films to a community of film lovers in Providence and across Rhode Island. For this festive occasion, the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop will be the guest of honor. The 2023 edition of our festival featured the film Saint Omer and Alice Diop will return, this time in person, to open the festival with Nous (We), her acclaimed 2022 documentary on the peripheral zones of Paris. The screening of her other documentary, Clichy pour l'exemple (2006), will also include a "carte blanche" selection by Alice Diop herself among the films that compose her "Ideal Cinematheque of the Outskirts of the World," a project she began in 2020 with the Centre Pompidou and Ateliers Médicis. Each of the films included in this ongoing project (with already hundreds of both shorts and features) probes the contours of the peripheral zones that are both marginalized by the center and critical of its role.
Guided by the strength and attentiveness of Alice Diop's gaze, we will thus turn toward the margins whose representations and narratives cinema often questions: the margins of capital cities, the margins of the West, margins of old and new empires—spaces of resistance where it is possible to invent something else.
Alice Diop will also join us to pay tribute to Chantal Akerman, a leading figure in Belgian cinema, for the tenth anniversary of her death. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman's masterpiece, is yet another questioning of the margins—in this instance, the daily life of a woman, whose domestic work becomes increasingly unhinged.

Several films in our 2025 selection probe other interstitial spaces. In Souleymane's Story by Boris Lojkine, 2024 winner of « Un certain regard » at Cannes, a young Guinean deliveryman travels through Parisian streets on his bicycle while he prepares the narrative for his asylum application in France (the film is based on the life of its main actor, Abou Sangare). This Life of Mine, the last feature film made by Sophie Fillières, who died before its completion (her children made the final cut), tells a story of loneliness, of an elusive identity: in her notes, the filmmaker evoked the "self-reflection" of the main character, masterfully played by Agnès Jaoui, whose disorientation is at once comical, violent and marked by a sort of self-inspired horror.

To narrate: this is the demand the judiciary machine repeatedly makes of the main character of Through the Night (Delphine Girard, 2023) who is at the heart of a rape trial. And it is also what everyone expects from the heroine of Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo van Dijl, 2024), who chooses to remain silent rather than to expose sexual violence in the world of professional tennis.

​Alongside these films, at times overwhelming and haunted by silences, others are much more hyperbolic in nature. Wild Diamond (Agathe Riedinger, 2024) offers a striking portrait of youth culture dominated by the blinding light of televised reality and social networks. The excessiveness of words, and chatty rhetoric, are also the object of Quentin Dupieux's irony, which unmasks contemporary hypocrisies in The Second Act (featured as the opening film at Cannes in 2024). And in Testament (2023), with his characteristic biting irony, the Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand reveals the complacency of competing discourses around political correctness.
A dark rural world full of secrets haunts Alain Guiraudie's fascinating Misericordia (2024), which shines a dim light on the movements of desire. In contrast, Bas Devos's Here (2023) depicts a serene atmosphere as a Romanian worker and a Chinese botanist walk through a lush green vegetal world situated on the margins of the city. It is this same ecological vision that inspires Savages, Claude Barras's animated feature filmed in stop motion which militates for the defense of forests and their inhabitants.

Through the works of Alice Diop and Chantal Akerman and through a selection of fifteen films (Belgian, Canadian, Swiss, and French), our thirtieth edition of the Providence French and Francophone Film Festival resonates with questions and concerns about our world, where threatening horizons coexist with fragile yet necessary resistance.