Image from 'The Mali-Cuba Connection'
Like many good things, the annual Festival of Films in French started small. It debuted nearly a quarter century ago in a UW-Milwaukee classroom, the freelance project of instructors from the university’s French department. It moved to the campus’ Union Cinema and expanded the size and scope of programming to embrace films from the entire francophone world. Last year’s FFF ran as usual at the Union Cinema, just weeks before the pandemic hit. This year, with COVID still out of control, the festival will be virtual, running Feb. 12-14 and Feb. 19-21.
I asked Sarah Davies Cordova, professor in UWM’s Department of French, Italian and Comparative Literature, about this year’s Festival of Films in French:
At what point was it clear that virtual was the only way to go? What other considerations drove the programming for this year’s festival?
Due to COVID, UWM’s campus has been closed since March 13, 2020 and when classes started in the Fall, the campus remained closed to all conference and socio-cultural co-curricular activities. This included the UWM Cinema. We wanted to maintain the FFF, our 24th Festival and ensure that it was safe for everyone to enjoy a few films that were not generally available on the commercial platforms.
These commercial platforms (Netflix and Amazon, etc.) were not willing to share the rights to a number of films we considered programming. The UWM Student Union Cinema and Student Involvement have not been in a position to hire the students to support the kind of programming and the behind the scenes set up that festivals the size of the Festival of Films in French necessitate.
How did you select the four films and what were your guiding principles in programming?
We continue to program documentaries and feature films from across the Francophone world that reflect and enrich UWM’s Program in French’s cultural components as well as offer tie-ins to other programs across campus and the community-at-large of Francophiles and cinephiles.
We are thrilled to have Jean-Pierre Thorn's The Acrid Scent of Immortals and the adaptation of Gaël Faye’s eponymous novel Small Country this year. They have both spent time on campus and in Milwaukee. Thorn in 2015, when we programmed two of his films, Faire kiffer les anges and 93 la belle rebelle and organized a round-table discussion with Paul Cebar and Cedric Garner as well as Portia Cobb (UWM) and Nat Godley (Alverno); and Faye in 2018 when he was on a book tour for the translation of Petit Pays and visited the campus for a conversation with bilingual readings and musical interludes with Paul Cebar and went into the community to speak with MPS students about his rap albums.
The second week-end’s films take us to Madagascar, to Mali and to Cuba. They are in each case filmed by French directors Edouard Joubeaud and Edouard Salier respectively, who have journeyed to Madagascar and worked with dancers and musicians to tell Hainga’s story or who followed Richard Minier the music producer on his quest over some 18 years researching the 10 Malian students who went to Cuba to study music in 1963 and created the iconic ensemble Los Maravillas de Mali.
How will viewers access this year’s programming?
All films are in French and other languages with English subtitles, free and open to everyone to watch on their “home” screens from 9 a.m. Friday-12 midnight Sunday.
We invite everyone to visit the Festival of Films in French, which will go live in early February for more information and to sign up for each of the films and obtain the code to stream the film from the UWM Cinema.
