The 32nd Alliance Francaise French Film Festival. Palace Electric. March 4 to 31, 2021. More information: affrenchfilmfestival.org and palacecinemas.com.au.
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The Alliance Francaise's French Film Festival is back in a big way after a coronavirus-affected 2020.
Director of the Alliance Francaise de Canberra Nancy Ford-Waites says, "This year, when ticket sales opened on the first Wednesday in February, we had the biggest first-day sales in our history across Australia."
The 37 films - 33 of them Australian premieres - in this year's festival have been chosen by its new artistic director, Karine Mauris.
Ford-Waites says the pandemic had both local and global effects on the 2020 French Film Festival,
"In Canberra last year the festival was launched in March and 10 days later it closed down."
In 2019 the festival had run four weeks, screened 43 films and sold about 18,500 tickets.
The 2020 festival was resumed on Bastille Day - July 14 - but with a shorter span, no special events and screenings limited to 50 per cent capacity.
Ford-Waites hopes the 2021 festival will be able to run more smoothly despite the lingering effects of coronavirus: reduced audience capacity and not quite as many movies as usual.
However, we're faring a lot better than France, where cinemas are still closed.
COVID-19 affected the supply of films available for consideration and screening since many shooting schedules were postponed, although films were able to go through postproduction during lockdown.
Ford-Waites says films give us "different ways of seeing the world" and those included in this festival, whomever they're made by and whatever they're about, give us French as well as individual ways of doing just that.
The opening-night film is a world premiere. Eiffel is, Ford-Waites says, "a beautiful love story".
It dramatises the professional and personal life of Georges Eiffel (played by Romaine Duris) during the design and construction of the tower that bears his name for the 1889 World's Fair. The design was controversial at the time, but the structure became an instantly-recognisable symbol of Paris and of France.
Ford-Waites says the closing-night film, #Iamhere, is another love story and an unusual one.
"It starts in France and ends in Korea."
It tells the story of Stephane (Alain Chabat), an ageing French chef is who engaged in an intimate online relationship with Soo, a woman he met on Instagram, and eventually decides to fly to Korea to meet her.
"It's heartwarming, touching and funny," Ford-Waites says of the film, which is more than a romance: it's a look at the transitions people go through in life and about cultural differences.
"I had tears in my eyes," she says, adding, "I love this film."
The festival, Ford-Waites says, is always made up of "new films and one classic". This year the festival is presenting one of the landmarks of French cinema, a newly restored version of Jean Luc-Godard's debut, Breathless (1960).
Ford-Waites says Breathless is one of the high points of the iconoclastic French Nouvelle Vogue (New Wave). The highly influential film - in which a fugitive killer (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is taken in by an American student (Jean Seberg) - was inspired by American crime dramas but "done in a very French style". It was noted for its innovative editing, especially the use of jump cuts.
French star Isabelle Huppert, well known to international audiences, plays the title role in The Godmother.
"She is brilliant."
Huppert plays Patience, a poorly paid police translator who moonlights as a drug dealer in order to supplement her income.
"She's fulfilling her responsibilities in an unconventional way," Ford-Waites says, adding that the film is about Patience as a strong, independent woman as well as a suspenseful crime film.
Ford-Waites says the title character in Fahim, the Little Chess Prince is "a young, budding chess genius whose father takes him from Bangladesh to France to be instructed in chess by a master teacher".
That teacher, Sylvain Charpentier, is played by another veteran French star, Gerard Depardieu. While the film is about chess - and Sylvain's efforts to bring out the best in his eight-year-old pupil - it also weighs into the ongoing debate about immigration
"It turns out he hasn't got the right papers."
Ford-Waites says Poly is "a wonderful family film in the festival".
Poly is based on the 1961 book by Cecile Aubry, whose Belle and Sebastian was also adapted into a film by this film's writer-director Nicolas Vanier. It's set in the Cevennes region in the 1960s. Ten-year-old Cecile (Elisa de Lambert) organises a mission to rescue mistreated Shetland pony Poly from a circus, but the unscrupulous owner wants her back.
In Aline, Valerie Lamercier directs and plays the title role, a character who's one of 13 children in a rural Canadian family and who goes on to become a big music star. It's a biopic of Celine Dion in all but name, which Lamercier - who sings Dion's songs - has described as a tribute to the singer.
"It's a lot of fun," Ford-Waites says.
There are many other films to discover, including Miss, about a boy who dreams of transcending traditional binary definitions by entering the Miss France Beauty pageant and Arab Blues, a fish-out-of-water comedy in which a psychotherapist moves from Paris to her home town in Tunisia.
And, of course, this being a French film festival, there's more than a dash of amour to be found.