American French Movie Competition Targets Younger Audiences – The Hollywood Reporter

Movie festivals entertain, encourage and infrequently can launch new expertise in entrance and behind the digital camera. However few festivals, particularly within the U.S., run purpose-built applications to develop younger audiences.

Going into its twenty sixth version, the American French Movie Competition (the L.A.-based competition targeted on French cinema and previously referred to as COLCOA) has hosted Southern California highschool college students since 2008. The competition now opens its theater doorways on the Los Angeles DGA to greater than 3,000 college students a 12 months. This 12 months, the overall variety of excessive schoolers to have watched a French movie on the competition over time will tick above 32,000.

It began with an thought hatched by the American French Movie Competition (TAFFF) founder François Truffart to ask college students to share within the Francophone enjoyable, says Pascal Ladreyt, who heads up the inspiration European Languages and Motion pictures in America (ELMA), the important thing sponsor behind the TAFFF’s schooling initiatives.

ELMA, a nonprofit that focuses on showcasing European movies, acts as a booster to festivals looking for so as to add an academic element surrounding cultural trade and younger cinema-audience constructing. “ELMA tries to assist festivals go above and past,” says Ladreyt, who has a background in enterprise and likewise labored in international affairs as a director of French cultural facilities on either side of the Atlantic. “Festivals are run by passionate individuals who work with very small groups, and oftentimes all this work goes into one thing and there’s no cash left for advertising and marketing, so nobody comes.” Or a competition merely is ready to carry out a dwindling coterie of foreign-language movie buffs — the “expats and the older cinephiles, nevertheless it’s lacking the goal actually.” ELMA steps in to assist increase the attain to youthful and extra mainstream American audiences. Along with TAFFF, this fall ELMA will likely be supporting festivals together with Screamfest, Animation Is Movie, Polish Movie Competition L.A. and AFI Fest. 

TAFFF’s deputy director, Anouchka van Riel, who has overseen the fest’s instructional element for six years, says “this system is exclusive and an amazing quantity of labor went into it.” With assist from the American Affiliation of Lecturers of French (AATF), this system yearly attracts college students from about 50 to 70 excessive colleges all through Southern California, from each private and non-private colleges. College students bus into the DGA from far and broad. “Some get up at 4 a.m., coming in from Santa Barbara or Victorville,” says van Riel. 

“The format for the highschool screenings is similar as once we began, and works rather well,” says Ladreyt. The screenings happen each weekday throughout the competition, which runs Oct. 10-16 this 12 months. College students could have the chance to pose with French props (berets and baguettes) on a step-and-repeat earlier than the screening of high-concept buddy comedy Two of a Sort (Jumeaux mais pas trop) — about brothers, one black, one white, who uncover they share the identical DNA — within the DGA’s largest theater, which seats 600. A primary-time narrative characteristic directed by Olivier Ducray and Wilfried Méance starring in style up-and-comers Ahmed Sylla and Bertrand Usclat, Two of a Sort gained the Viewers Award at this 12 months’s Alpe d’Huez Worldwide Comedy Movie Competition and was simply launched in France on Sept. 28. College students will be capable to work together with writer-director Méance and actor Usclat throughout the Q&A. 

Van Riel says the intercultural trade and the stunning dialogue emanating from the Q&As after the screenings make for a “very magical” expertise. “Among the finest conversations occur when highschool college students ask inquiries to the expertise in attendance. The questions are very uncensored and real.”

“The cultural panorama is so dry right here,” she provides. “We reside in a metropolis that has been constructed on cinema, however some children have by no means attended an American movie screening with expertise connected. They’re floored after they can work together with individuals who made the movie.” Van Riel, who grew up in Europe, says “I used to be form of spoiled” in France, the place cultural applications and subject journeys for college kids are plentiful. “In France, tradition is completely sponsored.”

The fest communicates with colleges all year long to coordinate this system. Public excessive colleges have a better head depend, some approaching a number of buses, whereas non-public colleges are available in smaller packs, notes Van Riel, including that most of the public colleges discover it troublesome to afford the bus leases to move college students to the DGA: “Children have to clean vehicles over the weekend to pay for the bus.” Whereas the turnout comes from an excellent mixture of private and non-private colleges that train French, the outreach has broadened to performing arts colleges and magnet colleges which have a concentrate on the humanities, or colleges which might be “ for the sake of getting conversations round tradition,” she says.

Submit screening surveys from academics and college students, collected by ELMA, present “superb information,” says van Riel. “Virtually 80 % of scholars have been saying, ‘We don’t thoughts in any respect about subtitles. We’re simply completely happy to be launched to those movies. After we see them, we need to see extra.’ It’s a virtuous circle.”

Earlier than wider American audiences found foreign-language treasures, akin to South Korean content material, largely via the varied streaming platforms, van Riel says TAFFF’s applications have been already constructing bridges for subtitled movies. She factors to South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s quote, whose Parasite gained the 2020 finest image Oscar: “‘When you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you’ll be launched to so many extra superb movies.” She provides, “It’s what Pascal has been doing for greater than 15 years with us. Subtitles aren’t an obstacle.”

To assist put together college students and academics for the TAFFF movie in addition to a post-film dialog, an in depth syllabus doc is created and shared with academics prematurely. 

“The writing of the syllabus is a big activity divided amongst three to 4 members of the AATF Committee,” says Inès du Cos de la Hitte, president of AATF’s Southern California chapter and the world languages higher faculty trainer at Sierra Canyon College in Chatsworth, Calif. “These academics collaborate, do loads of analysis to substantiate the fabric, and create grade-appropriate actions with totally different levels of complexity. A number of actions geared towards AP college students observe the rules established by the Faculty Board.” She provides it’s a “enjoyable and enriching solution to complement the rigorous course.” The scholars who take part in screenings are also eligible to undergo a movie critique essay contest. “The winner is rewarded throughout a ceremony in late Might.”

Among the many suggestions shared on TAFFF’s web site is a be aware from a trainer who attended with college students in 2019 from Camino Nuevo Excessive College (a constitution faculty serving the Westlake/MacArthur Park space of Los Angeles): “(We’re) a small French program in a low-income constitution. Attending the screening was extraordinarily helpful for my college students — merely to share that house with all the different college students from different colleges who examine French, along with the movie itself, and the conversations across the movie and French tradition that occurred in our classroom. … My college students don’t have a lot contact with French tradition of their neighborhoods, so this was actually nice for them.”

Along with the highschool screenings, TAFFF additionally runs Grasp Class applications, organized with the assist of the movie and TV division of the French Consulate, alongside ELMA. The Grasp Lessons carry expertise from the competition movies to college campuses. This 12 months, filmmakers will likely be heading to Chapman College in Orange County and Pasadena Metropolis Faculty. 

“It was vital to open applications to extra different crowds, not simply movie colleges,” says van Riel. “We acquired requests from group schools, and found that there was an enormous potential and ask from these locations.” Headed to Pasadena this 12 months is Anissa Bonnefont’s Nadia, a doc about Afghan soccer participant Nadia Nadim. It would contain an in-depth interview across the movie and filmmaker (Bonnefont additionally directed the doc Surprise Boy, about vogue home Balmain’s inventive director Olivier Rousteing). Chapman will welcome writer-director Céline Devaux, whose first characteristic All people Loves Jeanne will likely be proven to movie college students. The Grasp Class program is restricted partially because of the truth that licensing charges have to be waived by the movies’ gross sales firms for these on-campus screenings, says van Riel. TAFFF and ELMA organizers say they’d wish to develop the Grasp Class program to be as sturdy because the competition’s highschool screenings.

The wildly in style highschool screenings have some fest backers positing that this system could have turn out to be a raison d’etre for the competition. “With 3,115 college students attending TAFFF in 2021, we broke the document of attendance,” says François Besson, who’s a member of the primary group behind TAFFF, the Franco American Cultural Fund. “We might ask ourselves whether or not the tutorial element of the competition is a side-event, or if, quite the opposite, it has turn out to be the core mission of the competition.”