ABOUT FÉROCE ET FORMIDABLE

Appalachian State University’s Belk Library and Information Commons and the Department of English present the ASU French Film Festival on seven Tuesdays throughout the 2022-2023 school year. All screenings will be held at 6:30pm at the Greenbriar Theatre in the Plemmons Student Union, and will include program notes, guest speakers, and other surprises along with the films. Admission is free and open to the general public.

“We’ve organized the films around a couple of themes,” says [?]. “One major theme is called ‘Defiant Women, Insurgent Desires,’ with movies that tell stories about women’s bodies enmeshed in social issues and controversies.” Happening (2022) and Lingui: The Sacred Bonds (2022) address abortion and reproductive rights, while Benedetta (2021) chronicles an affair between two 17th-century nuns and Little Girl (2020) is a documentary about an eight-year-old transgirl growing up in rural France.

Another theme is “French Film Flashbacks,” featuring two classics: Stolen Kisses (1968), one of director François Truffaut’s inimitable films about his semi-autobiographical character Antoine Doniel, and The Red Circle (1970), a suspenseful caper movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and starring Alain Delon and Yves Montand. One film in the series that doesn’t fit into a theme is Josep (2022), an animated film about a guard and an artist who bond in a French concentration camp during World War II.