Contact Us

Fax: 202-885-2429

CAS Dean's Office 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20016-8012 United States

Liberal Arts

A Celebration of French Cinema

Join WCL for the Albertine Cinémathèque Film Festival October 31–November 15

American University’s Department of World Languages & Cultures (WLC) presents the Albertine Cinémathèque Film Festival in the Mary Graydon Center’s Wechsler Theater, Room 315. Designed to expand access to French cinema and support film programming at American colleges and universities, Albertine Cinémathèque’s annual film selection engages with the greatest issues of our time, while nurturing an enduring love for this diverse and evolving art form. Admission is free, no advance registration is required, and the event is open to the AU community and the public. For questions, contact Isabel Rivero-Vilá.

France (2021)

October 31, 1-3 p.m.

Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film, which starts out as a satire of the contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something richer and darker. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont (The Life of Jesus, NYFF35) casts Seydoux as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, homelife, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street. This accident triggers a series of self-reckonings, as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. A film that teases at redemption while refusing to grant absolution, France is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent—a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.

A Tale of Love and Desire (Une histoire d'amour et de désir) (2021)

November 1, 5-7:30 p.m.

Ahmed, 18, French of Algerian origin, grew up in the suburbs of Paris. At the university, he meets Farah, a young Tunisian girl, full of energy, who has just arrived in Paris. While discovering a collection of sensual and erotic Arab literature he never imagined existed, Ahmed falls head over heels in love with Farah, and although literally overwhelmed with desire, he will try to resist it.

400 Blows (Les 400 coups) (1959)

400 Blow, film

November 3, 1 - 3 p.m.

A young Parisian boy, Antoine Doinel, neglected by his derelict parents, skips school, sneaks into movies, runs away from home, steals things, and tries (disastrously) to return them. Like most kids, he gets into more trouble for things he thinks are right than for his actual trespasses. Unlike most kids, he gets whacked with the big stick. He inhabits a Paris of dingy flats, seedy arcades, abandoned factories, and workaday streets, a city that seems big and full of possibilities only to a child’s eye.

Little Girl (Petite Fille) (2020)

November 7, 1-3 p.m.

Little Girl is the moving portrait of 7-year-old Sasha, who has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France. Realized with delicacy and intimacy, Sébastien Lifshitz’s documentary poetically explores the emotional challenges, everyday feats, and small moments in Sasha’s life.

Lingui, The Sacred Bonds (Lingui, Les liens sacrés) (2021)

November 8, 1-3 p.m.

Amina, a practicing Muslim, lives with her daughter, 15-year-old Maria. When Amina learns Maria is pregnant and wants to abort the child, they face an impossible situation in a country where abortion is legally and morally condemned.

BAMAKO (2006)

BAMAKO Trailer from Icarus Films on Vimeo.

November 10, 4:30-7:00 p.m.

Outside the modest home that singer Melé and her husband Chaka share with other families stands a make-shift open-air courtroom. The accused: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the inequities of globalization perpetrated on all of Africa. One by one, witnesses take the stand in Sissako’s pointed, nuanced meta-drama.

The Story of a Three Day Pass (La Permission) (1967)

The story of a three day pass

November 14, 1-3 p.m.

Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into a segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the language, and wrote a number of books in French, one of which, La permission, would become his stylistically innovative feature debut. Turner (Harry Baird), an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base by his casually racist commanding officer and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman (Nicole Berger)—but what happens to their love when his furlough is over? Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race that is playful, sarcastic, and stingingly subversive by turns, and that laid the foundation for the scorched-earth cinematic revolution he would unleash just a few years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

AFRYKAS and the Magic Box, and 2 short films

Absa from Afrykas and the Magic Bus.
November 15, 5:00 - 7:30 p.m.

AFRYKAS is a journey and a tribute to Senegalese cinema, its filmmakers, women artists and the mothers who inspire us. The film introduces us to the African landscape, the vibrant city of Dakar and the daily lives of our characters. Their testimonies allow us to understand the uniqueness of Senegalese cinema, their dedication to cinema, the importance of the mother figure in Senegalese society, their inspiration,, their dreams, their struggles and their dedication to the education of future generations. AFRYKAS and the Magic Box won Best Picture at 2022 Docuworld Film Festival.