The Department of French and Italian in collaboration with the College of Humanities, the School of International Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Student / Faculty Interaction Program presents "The Tournées Festival", a free and open to the public movies series featuring popular modern French movies with English subtitles. The series will take place from February 3rd until March 3rd in the Pacheco Integrated Learning Center 120 (ILC) every Thursday at 7pm. The Tournées Festival was made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), the Florence Gould Foundation, The Grand Marnier Foundation and highbrow entertainment.

February 3, 2011

L'HEURE D'ÉTÉ (SUMMER HOURS)
Olivier Assayas / 2008 / 100 min. / Not rated /
Faculty Presenters: Fabian Alfie, Alain-Philippe Durand

After the globe-spanning settings of his last three films, Olivier Assayas returns home for the mournful Summer Hours, examining a bourgeois French family trying to negotiate the past, present, and future. Assayas’s sincere, complex concern about cultural amnesia—the eroding of a nation’s heritage by the demands of the international economy—is rendered so deftly that the theme becomes one of larger, less class-specific importance.

February 10, 2011

LA GRAINE ET LE MULET (THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN)
Abdellatif Kechiche / 2007 / 151 min. / Not rated / Faculty Presenter: Carine Bourget

This stunning film takes place in the Southern French city of Sète where Slimane, the patriarch of a large and vivacious North African family, is an elderly dockworker. When his job of many years is suddenly no longer secure, he decides to restore an old boat, and turn it into a floating couscous restaurant. It’s a wildly ambitious project, and the increasingly ailing Slimane will need the help of all of his family members in order to pull it off.

February 17, 2011

PARIS (PARIS)
Cédric Klapisch / 2007 / 130 min. / Rated “R” / Restricted – Under 17 requires accompanying adult over the age of 21 / Faculty Presenter: Reginald McGinnis

In Cédric Klapisch’s wistful ensemble film about the City of Light, characters of vastly different backgrounds intersect, providing a sense of the multitudes and complexities contained within one of the world’s greatest metropolises. Regardless of whether you’ve never been to Paris or have visited several times, Klapisch’s stunning compositions of the city will inspire you to book a flight to the French capital right away.

February 24, 2011

35 RHUMS (35 SHOTS OF RUM)
Claire Denis /2008 / 100 min. / Not rated / Faculty Presenter: Phyllis Taoua

Films about families and their complications all too often pierce eardrums with shrieks of dysfunction. Amid the din, Claire Denis’s sublime 35 Shots of Rum stands out all the more for its soothing quiet, conveying the easy, frequently nonverbal intimacy between a widowed father and his university-student daughter.

March 3, 2011

BARBE BLEUE (BLUEBEARD)
Catherine Breillat / 2008 / 80 min. / Not rated / Faculty Presenter: Aileen Feng

Perhaps the greatest feminist provocatrice working in cinema today, Catherine Breillat slyly subverts Charles Perrault’s gruesome 1697 fairy tale about a monstrous aristocrat who marries and murders a series of wives. By inserting semiautobiographical scenes of two sisters in the 1950s who are fascinated with this grisly narrative, Breillat creates a clever framing device to explicate a centuries-old story—and tease out its relevance today.