Film at Lincoln Center announces the first-ever U.S. theatrical release of Maurice Pialat’s La maison des bois, marking the world premiere of its luminous 4K restoration from Janus Films. The seven-part series will be presented at FLC from April 22 through April 28, accompanied by three essential Pialat features—L’enfance nue, Graduate First, and À nos amours—each approaching, from a distinct vantage point, the fixations that shape the director’s epic work.

Regarded by many as Pialat’s “best film” and rarely seen in a theatrical setting, La maison des bois returns in a new restoration that finally reveals its quiet, overwhelming force on the big screen. In 1971, at age 45 and with only one feature behind him, Pialat accepted a commission for French television and transformed it into something unmistakably his own. Working closely with longtime collaborator Arlette Langmann, he reworked René Wheeler’s original script and crafted a seven-part chronicle that feels at once spontaneous and novelistic in scope.

Unfolding in a village north of Paris over the course of World War I, the series follows gamekeeper Albert Picard and his wife Jeanne, who take in three displaced Parisian boys at their home on the edge of the woods. What begins in sharply drawn characterizations and narrative precision gradually loosens into something more impressionistic and immersive, a war epic built from accumulating details. Simultaneously tender and unsentimental, La maison des bois stands as one of the great, underseen achievements of postwar French filmmaking. 

The accompanying films span postwar foster care, late-1970s provincial adolescence, and a combustible Parisian household, returning again and again to young people navigating families and institutions, and to the volatile, often contradictory impulses that other films fall prey to soften or sensationalize. Whether as entry points into the world of La maison des bois or as opportunities to revisit these works in the Walter Reade Theater, they reaffirm the fierce consistency with which Pialat pursued emotional truths.

Born in 1925 to a middle-class family, Pialat’s childhood was permeated by feelings of abandonment, presenting a common theme throughout many of his works. Originally intending to become a painter, he eventually turned to filmmaking, making his first short film in 1960 and completing his first feature, L’enfance nue, in his early forties. While perhaps not as widely recognized as directors who were part of the French New Wave, today Pialat is one of the most frequently cited influences among a generation of French filmmakers including Catherine Breillat, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, and Philippe Garrel.

Organized by Florence Almozini, Vice President of Programming, Film at Lincoln Center and Tyler Wilson, Senior Programmer, Film at Lincoln Center.

Tickets go on sale Friday, March 6 at 2pm, with early access for FLC Members beginning at noon. Experience all of La maison des bois (screening in two parts) and more features by purchasing two or more tickets for $15 for GP; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for FLC Members. Single tickets to each part of La maison des bois and the features are $18; $15 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $13 for FLC Members. 

FILM DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street)

New 4K Restoration
La maison des bois
Maurice Pialat, 1971, France, 380m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Theatrical Premiere

La maison des bois. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Long spoken of as Maurice Pialat’s “best film” and rarely seen in a theatrical setting, La maison des bois returns in a luminous new 4K restoration that finally reveals its quiet, overwhelming force on the big screen. In 1971, at age 45 and with only one feature (L’Enfance nue) behind him, Pialat accepted a commission for French television and transformed it into something unmistakably his own. Working closely with his longtime collaborator Arlette Langmann—credited here as editor but deeply involved in reshaping the script in real time during production—Pialat reworked René Wheeler’s original script episode by episode, crafting a seven-part chronicle that feels at once spontaneous and novelistic in scope.

Unfolding in a village north of Paris over the course of World War I, the series follows gamekeeper Albert Picard (comedian Pierre Doris, cast against type) and his wife Jeanne (Jacqueline Dufranne), who take in three displaced Parisian boys at their home on the edge of the woods. At its emotional center is 10-year-old Hervé (Hervé Lévy), whose father is at the front lines and whose mother has abandoned him. Through his eyes we watch a tightly bound community slowly unsettled by the war’s advancing shadow, though Pialat keeps his camera far from the front, turning instead to kitchens, schoolhouses (where the director himself plays the teacher), catechism lessons, taverns, and country roads. What begins in sharply drawn characterizations and narrative precision gradually loosens into something more impressionistic and immersive, a war epic built from accumulating details—a stolen letter read aloud, a river picnic that recalls Renoir, a mother mourning her son before he has even departed. There is no grand plot, only the steady accrual of departures and absences until the village is irrevocably changed. At once tender and unsentimental, La maison des bois stands as one of the great, underseen achievements of postwar French filmmaking. Restored in 4K by INA. A Janus Films release.

The series will be presented in two parts: 

Episodes 1–3 (148m)
Wednesday, April 22 at 6:00pm
Thursday, April 23 at 3:00pm
Friday, April 24 at 1:00pm
Saturday, April 25 at 3:00pm
Sunday, April 26 at 3:00pm
Monday, April 27 at 6:00pm
Tuesday, April 28 at 3:00pm

Episodes 4–7 (232m)
Thursday, April 23 at 6:15pm
Friday, April 24 at 4:15pm
Saturday, April 25 at 6:15pm
Sunday, April 26 at 6:15pm
Tuesday, April 28 at 6:15pm

New 4K Restoration
L’enfance nue
Maurice Pialat, 1968, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of Restoration

L’enfance nue. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Maurice Pialat was already in his early forties when he made his epochal debut, L’enfance nue (Naked Childhood), a devastating portrait of 10-year-old François, a troubled foster child passed from home to home in Lens. Played by Michel Terrazon with a riveting mix of volatility and vulnerability, François becomes one of the foundational figures of Pialat’s cinema: a child at once combative, withdrawn, and aching for connection. Working with largely nonprofessional performers and real environments, Pialat strips the “lost child” narrative of sentimentality, favoring abrupt ellipses, behavioral detail, and emotional understatement. The result is neither social case study nor melodrama, but something rawer and more unsettling. As he would throughout his career—including in his expansive follow-up La maison des bois—Pialat locates drama not in plot mechanics but in the fragile, often painful negotiations between youth and the adult world. An NYFF6 selection. A Janus Films release.
Wednesday, April 22 at 3:45pm
Wednesday, April 22 at 9:00pm
Thursday, April 23 at 1:00pm
Saturday, April 25 at 1:00pm
Monday, April 27 at 1:30pm

Graduate First / Passe ton bac d’abord…
Maurice Pialat, 1978, France, 85m
French with English subtitles

Graduate First

Conceived as a loose sequel to L’enfance nue, Graduate First returns to Lens in northern France, now in sharper decline, and widens its focus from one troubled boy to a group of working-class teenagers facing the looming baccalauréat. They hover between school and the unemployment line, sleep together, fall into half-hearted marriages, talk of Paris, fight, smoke, take seaside trips… anything to delay the exam and the future it pretends to secure. Reworked after false starts as a television documentary and shaped in close collaboration with locals, the film draws on real conversations that Pialat transforms with unsparing clarity yet quiet tenderness. Desires flare, tempers snap, plans dissolve, and the small illusions of youth give way to something undeniably honest about a generation running in place. An NYFF19 selection. A Cohen Media Group release.
Sunday, April 26 at 1:00pm
Tuesday, April 28 at 1:00pm

2K Restoration
À nos amours
Maurice Pialat, 1983, France, 100m
French with English subtitles

À nos amours. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Co-written with Arlette Langmann and drawn in part from her own adolescence, À nos amours (To Our Loves) centers on Suzanne (the astonishing Sandrine Bonnaire, in her revelatory debut), a 16-year-old living in a cramped Paris apartment with her furrier parents and older brother. After losing her virginity at summer camp, Suzanne returns home and throws herself into a series of increasingly reckless relationships that test her independence as much as they betray her need to be loved. Pialat casts himself as her volatile father, whose fierce affection and sudden absences destabilize the family and intensify Suzanne’s defiance, culminating in a now-legendary dinner sequence that ranks among the most bracing confrontations in French cinema. Raw, unguarded, and exacting, yet never without compassion, À nos amours refuses easy moralizing and leaves us face to face with love stripped of its illusions. An NYFF22 selection. A Janus Films release.
Wednesday, April 22 at 1:30pm
Friday, April 24 at 8:30pm
Monday, April 27 at 3:30pm
Monday, April 27 at 9:00pm

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER
Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. FLC offers audiences the opportunity to discover works from established and emerging directors from around the world with a passionate community of film lovers at marquee events including the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films.

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