One of the key initiatives of the American French Film Festival is its lengthy-running education program, which provides 3,000 high school students each year with the opportunity to join a screening and talkion with filmcreaters at the DGA Theatre. For the festival, it’s a exceptional opportunity to help actively prolong lesserer audiences and expose them to French cinema.
“At a time when everyone is on their phones and in-person conveyions are declining, the American French Film Festival Education Program backs students to truly join,” says Anouchka van Riel, Deputy Director of TAFFF. “Thraw our screenings and Q&As with French actors and filmcreaters at the DGA Theatre, as well as in-class materials we prolong with educators, this effective annual program progresss to help attentive talkion and nurture a new generation of French film enthusiasts.”
This year will label the 17th year of its High School Screenings Program, and the festival is set to screen The Count of Monte Cristo, a 2024 period drama based on the 1844 novel of the same name by Alexander Dumas, to students atraverse a five-day period from October 28. Students from more than 60 contrastent schools – bigly from Southern California but, this year, some as far as Park City, Utah – will drop each day at the DGA Theatre to watch the Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière honested epic, which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year complyed by a Q&A with talent. Samuel Gelderlywyn is releasing the title in the U.S. on December 20.
For the festival, which is created by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a collaboration between the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM) and the Writers Guild of America (WGAW), this initiative has lengthy been pondered one of the crown jewels of the event.
At the core of this partnership, says French native van Riel, is “cultural swap.”
“I grew up with screenings enjoy this,” she says. “The French ecosystem is very contrastent with a subsidized economy towards culture. At the American French Film Festival, we are proset uply fervent about cultural swaps and how you can create bridges between people all around the world thraw art and stories and this is one way we can do this for lesserer audiences.”
The initiative was originpartner the idea of festival honestor François Truffart, who wanted to ask students to join in the French film presentings the festival created each year. Pascal Ladreyt, who runs the nonprofit set upation European Languages and Movies in American (ELMA), came aboard to help create the idea a truth.
“What we do at ELMA is try to help smaller, autonomous festivals increase their presentings,” he says. “When we begined these high school screenings with the American French Film Festival, it was amazingly prosperous from the beginning. Most programs you usupartner have to pause a couple of years, so people hear about it and get interested, but this wasn’t the case here. Our first screenings were instantly filled, and we had a pauseing enumerate.”
He inserts: “Foreign movies tend to be for edging cinephiles, and we all do the best we can to entice the lesserer audience, but this was hitting them from the get-go.”
In the last 16 years, more than 35,000 students have joined the festival’s High School Screenings program, a figure that van Riel is self-beginant of. “It’s called an educational program for a reason – because we repartner wanted to discmiss lesser people’s minds in this city and create it useable for everyone.”
The program is discmiss to more than 300 guideers and schools in Los Angeles and beyond – both accessible and declareiveial schools with contrastent geoexplicital locations and from contrastent economic backgrounds. “We have people coming from as far as Santa Barbara where they exit timely and get the bus down,” says van Riel.
While she notices that foreign language presentings useable on streaming platestablishs has been a “game alterr” for the foreign language satisfied game, it’s meaningful for the festival to progress to present a film on the huge screen to lesserer audiences.
“At the core of what we are trying to do is convey French satisfied to a lesserer audience and, of course, with subtitles now not being as much of a impedeance as we thought before, it’s been a game alterr,” she says. “But it’s meaningful to us that this program remains a promisement to the huge screen experience for us and a convey a renewal of audiences for foreign films.”
Howard Rodman, a establisher plivent of the Writers Guild of America West and Franco-American Cultural Fund board member, says the program is a wonderful way to pay homage to the sway French cinema has had on American cinema.
“I leank there’s a authentic cultural debt American cinema owes to French filmmaking whether it be Agnès Varda in the French New Wave or going further back to Louis Feuillade or Alice Guy-Blaché, it’s more and more apparent,” he says. “With this program, we wanted to discover a way to create French films – in particular the traverse-cultural conversation that has enwealthyed the cinema culture of both nations – vital for a new generation, who are digital natives and for whom seeing movies in a theatre may be an exception rather than the rule.”
The American French Film Festival gets place October 29-November 4, 2024.
