Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2020

[Chris Knipp]

NICOLAS VANIER: SPREAD YOUR WINGS/DONNE MOI DES AILES (2019)


LOUIS VAZQUEZ IN DONNE MOI DES AILES

113m
English, French, and Norwegian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Sulky teenager Thomas (Louis Vazquez) dreads spending summer with his father (Jean-Paul Rouve), an environmentalist in a rural, wifi-less hamlet. Much to his surprise, he grows attached to his father’s new project: an ambitious plan to train a flock of endangered geese to follow a new migratory path, avoidant of pollution and human-made threats. The duo embarks on a journey to the Arctic circle with an ultralight glider, which they’ll fly to guide the geese along their new route. Writer-director Nicolas Vanier (Loup) channels his passion for nature into this tale of our civic responsibility to protect it, a freewheeling adventure of both suspense and enlightening civic action.
French release 9 Oct., AlloCiné press rating 3.3 ((66%).
Sunday, March 15, 1:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: SOUTH TERMINAL/TERMINAL SUD (2019)


RAMZY BEDIA IN TERMINAL SUD

96m
The haunting, experiential latest from Rabah Ameur Zaïmeche (Story of Judas, Rendez-Vous 2016) centers on a doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in nineties Algeria, which is rapidly becoming a war zone. He spends his days tending to the wounded and comforting the suffering, yet maintains a stoic neutrality toward the ambiguous conflict, resolving that his job is simply to help those in pain. But once he starts receiving death threats and horrors begin to encroach on his own life, his moral position is shaken. As each day’s work wears on the doctor, the inhumanity of the violence turns his life into a purgatory, pushing him to question whether or not more drastic action might be called for.
French release 20 Nov., AlloCiné press 3.4 (68%).
Wednesday, March 11, 4:00pm
Sunday, March 15, 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KAHN: HAPPY BIRTHDAY/FÊTE DE FAMILLE (2019)


CATHERINE DENEUVE IN FÊTE DE FAMILLE

101m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Both buoyant and bittersweet, this perceptive ensemble piece directed by Cédric Kahn (whose Wild Life played in Rendez-Vous 2015) and headlined by Catherine Deneuve tests the ties that bind a family. Deneuve is matriarch Andréa, whose family comes together to celebrate her 70th birthday. Everything seems to be in order with her strait-laced son (Kahn) and his family, as well as with her more free-spirited son (Non-Fiction’s Vincent Macaigne), who plans to document the gathering on video. But when her mentally unstable daughter Claire (Emmanuelle Bercot, Cannes Best Actress winner for My King) reappears after three years, old resentments surface, not least from the teenager (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Luàna Bajrami) Claire abandoned. Kahn coaxes mood swings of warmth and vitriol from his cast in a film that takes place over the course of one hectic day.
French release 4 Sept., Allociné presds rating 3.3 (66%).
Thursday, March 12, 9:15pm
Sunday, March 15, 6:15pm