Schedule:

January 30, 2025

7:00pm: Anatomy of a Fall French Film Festival

Anatomy of a Fall
(Justine Triet, 2023, 151 min, France, French w/ English subtitles and English, DCP)

Justine Triet’s drama is a riveting procedural and a delicate inquiry into the impossibility of an ultimate truth in human relationships. When the husband of famous novelist Sandra Voyter (played by Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) is found dead on the ground outside their chalet in the French Alps, authorities suspect that she might have been responsible, as the impact and position of his body suggest a push rather than a fall. Triet’s fiercely intelligent, emotionally devastating film dissects the ways we create subjective narratives for ourselves and others and questions the insufficiency of language to describe the essential mysteries each of us possesses. At its core is the brilliant Hüller, whose Sandra is articulate, open, and utterly inscrutable.

“An intricately layered, surgically controlled drama that operates as both a courtroom thriller and an investigation of the mysterious recesses of domestic life.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“[A] Hitchcockian thriller for today.” – New Statesman

January 31, 2025

7:00pm: Orlando, My Political Biography French Film Festival

Orlando, My Political Biography
(Paul B. Preciado, 2023, 103 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, DCP)

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another." Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights. Fleet and visually inventive, Preciado’s film is a robust polemical inquiry into contemporary trans personhood and political disenfranchisement that points the way toward a possible utopia.

“[S]parklingly intelligent, Godard-puckish and moving, capable of deadpan wit and the most intimate swirl of ideas and emotions.” – Los Angeles Times

“Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves.” – Little White Lies

February 1, 2025

4:00pm: The Animal Kingdom French Film Festival

The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne Animal)
(Thomas Cailley, 2023, 128 min, France/Belgium, French w/English subtitles, DCP)

With his long-awaited follow-up to Love at First Fight (2014), Thomas Cailley, who most recently won Best Director at the 29th Lumière Awards in France, envisions a mysterious infection that selectively mutates the bodies of ordinary people into animal hybrids at unpredictable speeds. Nominated for 12 César Awards including Best Director and Best Film, this chilling scenario, conjured with vivid specificity and immediacy via dazzling, impeccably deployed special effects, serves as a relentlessly compelling backdrop to the central performances of Romain Duris (The Three Musketeers), Paul Kircher (the breakout star of Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy), and Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Passages, Planet B). Together, the trio of actors breathe life into this darkly imaginative exploration of a human ecosystem undergoing inexplicable—but potentially liberating—transformation.

“A light but meaty piece of magical-realism that threads the needle between Cronenbergian body horror and Miyazaki-like fantasy to create a modern parable that evokes any number of identifiable emergencies — deforestation, the AIDS epidemic, the global migration crisis and its attendant xenophobia, etc. — in the service of a story that refuses to be reduced into a clear metaphor for any one of them.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

February 6, 2025

7:00pm: The Night of the 12th French Film Festival

The Night of the 12th
(Dominic Moll, 2022, 115 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, DCP)

Introduced by Prof. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot (Romance Studies) and Mathilde Savard-Corbeil (Romance Studies)

Every police precinct has a case that defies explanation and evades solution. Recently promoted Captain Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon) faces such an elusive mystery when he investigates the gruesome murder of a young woman named Clara in the French town of Grenoble. It is clear that the attack was premeditated, and the violent nature of the crime suggests revenge. All the evidence points towards a scorned ex-lover, but which one? Vivés’ team methodically digs through the details of Clara’s life, uncovering her secrets while striving to weed out the killer.

Winner of 6 César Awards in 2023, including Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Adaptation

“ [Night of the 12th] assumes the perspective of the police without exempting them from its damning canvas; their cool investigative professionalism (and, in a sense, the film’s) registers as its own kind of complicity in a wretched, man’s-world status quo.” – Sight & Sound

“Somewhere beneath its enthralling depiction of obsessive police work is a cry from the heart against a broken system.” – Time Out

February 7, 2025

7:00pm: Banel and Adama French Film Festival

Banel & Adama
(Ramata-Toulaye Sy, 2023, 87 min, France/Senegal, Mali, Pulaar w/English subtitles, DCP)  

Introduced by Prof. Felwine Sarr (Romance Studies)

In a rural village in Senegal, Banel (Khady Mane) is happily married to Adama (Mamadou Diallo), the younger brother of her deceased first husband. Though their love is passionate, the relationship is tested by pressures from the community, which expects Banel to assume traditionally feminine domestic responsibilities, while her husband is meant to inherit the role of village chief from his late brother. Both young adults resist the mandate to fill these assigned duties, incurring disapproval from those around them—and possibly triggering supernatural repercussions. In her Palme d’Or nominated feature debut, Senegalese-French writer-director Ramata-Toulaye Sy conjures lyrical imagery reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, placing two memorable young lovers against a landscape as beautiful as it is inscrutable.

“A dreamlike debut…a lyrical, languid fable.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A promising debut for Sy, who combines an eye for arrestingly apocalyptic images…with skillful work with her non-professional cast…[including] a remarkable performance from [lead actress Khady] Mane, who conveys the mutinous, deluded anger in a young woman who would bend the world around her to her will if she could.” – Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

February 8, 2025

7:00pm: No Fear, No Die French Film Festival

No Fear, No Die
(Claire Denis, 1990, 97 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, DCP)

Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting. Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas star as Dah and Jocelyn, two immigrants (from Benin and French Antilles, respectively) living on the outskirts of Paris who earn money from cockfights. The escalating violence of the bouts—at the encouragement of the white owner of the restaurant (Jean-Claude Brialy) in whose basement the fights are held—takes its toll on the pair, and Jocelyn dreams of a life outside the brutal environment of feathered pugilism. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Frantz Fanon, the ruggedly unsentimental and psychologically evocative No Fear No Die is a forceful examination of the lives of immigrants in France and of the psychic toll of the violence imposed by colonizers upon the colonized.

“Denis’s first masterwork.” – Richard Brody

“[A] clear-eyed portrait of a world of violence and exploitation.” – Slant Magazine

February 13, 2025

7:00pm: The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire French Film Festival

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
(Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, 75 min, USA, English and French w/English subtitles, DCP)

“We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, the actress playing an actress grappling with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire. Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For her bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has taken a metacinematic and mesmerizing approach, using voice-over and direct address to evoke her writing, as well as meditative, immersive 16mm images of forests in Martinique to burrow to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history. Uniting Hunt-Ehrlich’s elegant narrative and visual strands is the presence of Hanrot, herself a new mother going through her own reckoning.

“Hunt-Ehlich’s lovely, questing, curious art film cannot singlehandedly redress Césaire’s omission from the annals. But it does suggest that if posterity has forgotten her, it’s only with its conscious mind, where “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” is piped in from the collective unconscious. Perhaps, when history sleeps on those who shaped it, this is what it dreams.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Date: January 30, 2025 - February 13, 2025

Location: Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater - 2020 Campus Drive Durham, NC 27705

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