A still from Elevator to the Gallows, a part of this year's festival
This year’s Festival of Films in French include 16 films spread across nine days in one venue at UW-Milwaukee. The annual event’s name is significant. Originally called the Milwaukee French Film Festival when it began 22 years ago, the festival’s mission quietly expanded to include the entire French-speaking world. This year’s program is not among the most diverse in the festival’s long run, but it includes films from Quebec, Niger and Belgium as well as France.
Anita Alkhas, assistant professor of French at UWM, has been involved with the festival for 19 years. She describes herself as the “logistics person” and recalls how the event grew from five films chosen by its founder, UWM French professor Gabrielle Verdier. “We have established a group of fans and our connections to the wider community has grown stronger,” Alkhas says. “I see familiar faces at the door year after year.” She cites the positive influence of the Milwaukee Film Festival on local film culture and adds that for cineastes, the Festival of Films in French has become a midwinter destination.
This year’s festival includes old and new. Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (7 p.m., Monday, Feb. 18) features a score by Miles Davis. African American dancer Josephine Baker appears in the 1927 silent film Parisian Pleasures (7 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 19). As usual, the festival includes one movie with a North African connection, a 1961 war film starring Charles Aznavour, Taxi for Tobruk (7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 21). Among the contemporary selections are Valley of Love, starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu (9 p.m., Friday, Feb. 15, and 5 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 16); and Django (7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 16, and 7 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 17), dramatizing the wartime-in-Paris experiences of the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
Special events at this year’s festival include a sing-along before Taxi for Tobruk (the French-Armenian Aznavour was a popular singer); a discussion with “Wisconsin Foodie’s” Kyle Cherek on the documentary Modified (Wednesday, Feb. 20); and talk-backs after Little by Little (Saturday, Feb. 23) and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Sunday, Feb. 24).
The Festival of Films in French runs Feb. 15-24 at the UWM Union Cinema, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd., Second floor. Admission to all films is free and all films are subtitled in English. For more information, visit uwm.edu/French-film-festival.
