French Film Festival proves simplicity is best

The annual French Film Festival is one of the most well-known events sponsored by VCU. Despite anti-French sentiment in the United Sates, the festival’s 11th year went off without a hitch this past weekend at the Byrd Theater.

Not even the unseasonably cold weather kept people from turning out for a weekend of French films. Attendance was so high that the theater opened its balcony section to accommodate everyone. Eleven of the films’ directors participated in a question-and-answer session after their movie ended. Four of the films that were shown were either 2003 Cesar (the French Oscars) winners or 2003 Oscar nominees.

“Se Souvenir Des Belles Choses” (“Remembering Something Beautiful”), the Cesar winner for best first film, included an acting role by its director, Zabou Breitman. The movie also received the nomination for best actress for Isabelle Carre. Breitman did a beautiful job comically telling a story of a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s. Unlike overly dramatized love stories with a dying protagonist, this film kept the movies’ atmosphere upbeat while it maintained a serious love story throughout the entire film. This movie intertwined love, humor and sadness without any problems. By the end, it had obviously touched members of the audience through its forced emotional involvement.

The short-film screenings of documentaries took place Saturday and Sunday. “Etre et Avoir” (“To Have and to Hold”) won the Cesar nomination for best editing. Nicolas Philibert directed this documentary, which focused on French country schools. In the film, one large estate house serves as a one-room school where one teacher educates kindergartner through fifth-graders. The relationship between the older and younger kids is quite intriguing in that the students become a family to one another. For these country school fifth-graders, moving from a country school to a city middle school is the most dramatic transition in their life. The parental role of the teacher, Monsieur Lopez, shines through when two boys get into an argument and he helps them sort it out so they can become friends.

These films showed that the French are able to create great movies without all the pricey visual effects and actors. The French Film Festival isn’t just about watching movies. It is a cultural event that adds new perceptions that don’t always coincide with Hollywood’s style of movies.