Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016

Valley of Love

Guillaume Nicloux’s sui generis, elegiac road film puts a moving and complex twist on a familiar setup. Titans Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert astound as famous French actors Gérard and Isabelle, a long-divorced couple whose recently deceased son Michael has sent them a letter from the grave requesting an enigmatic rendezvous in Death Valley.

Dheepan

Closing Night

Jacques Audiard won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this daring, genre-bending portrait of three Sri Lankan refugees who form a fake family unit to emigrate and find themselves living together in a violent, gang-dominated housing project outside Paris.

21 Nights with Pattie

U.S. Premiere

The latest oddball comedy from the Larrieu brothers (Love Is the Perfect Crime, Rendez-Vous 2014) follows a prim woman (Isabelle Carré) who travels to a small village in the Pyrénées to bury her estranged mother. There, she befriends the sexually adventurous Pattie (Karin Viard) and gets mixed up in a surreal police investigation. Also starring André Dussollier and Denis Lavant.

The Apaches

U.S. Premiere

In what Les Inrocks called his “patient, roving and reflective” second feature, Nassim Amaouche stars as a young French-Algerian man lured into making a mysterious business deal within one of Paris’s largest Kabyle communities, while falling in love with a beautiful single mother (Laetitia Casta).

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)

U.S. Premiere

Eva Husson’s debut feature, shot and set in the wealthy coastal suburbs of Biarritz, is an unapologetically blissed-out, frankly explicit anthology of the sexual experiments a cluster of teenagers undertake over the course of one summer.

Dark Inclusion

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Arthur Harari on 3/12, intro on 3/10

Featuring menacing tracking shots; a cool, metallic color palette; surprising third-act reversals; and a terrific ensemble cast, Arthur Harari's first feature is a poised, stylish, and utterly assured revenge thriller in which, following his estranged father’s death, a man vows vengeance against his relatives who had abandoned him and returns to the family diamond business with an elaborate robbery in mind.

A Decent Man

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Emmanuel Finkiel at 3/5 screening

Eddy (Nicolas Duvauchelle) finds himself in a position of strength after a mugging earns him the sympathy of his estranged family. But when the case starts to collapse against his alleged attacker Ahmed (Driss Ramdi), he’s forced back on the defensive.

Disorder

Q&A with Alice Winocour & Diane Kruger at 3/5 screening

Alice Winocour’s follow-up to Augustine (Rendez-Vous 2013) is another finely tuned drama of unstable intimacy and mental imbalance—this time centered on a troubled war veteran (Matthias Schoenaerts) and the wealthy businessman’s wife (Diane Kruger) he’s hired to protect.

Fatima

Philippe Faucon’s eighth feature—winner of the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best French Film—is a patient, reflective study of a North African-born single mother pressured by her neighbors and her two teenage children alike to assimilate into a culture of which she’s wary.

The Great Game

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Nicolas Pariser & Melvil Poupaud on 3/4; intro on 3/5

An elegant political thriller, Nicolas Pariser’s debut feature stars Melvil Poupaud (of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale) as a onetime darling novelist disgusted with the publishing world who lets a duplicitous government insider (André Dussollier) tempt him into ghostwriting a manifesto designed to transform the landscape of French public opinion.

Lolo

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Julie Delpy & composer Mathieu Lamboley on 3/8, intro by Julie Delpy on 3/9

In the latest from Julie Delpy, one of French cinema’s great renaissance talents, a world-weary fashionista (Delpy) finds her happy new relationship with a slightly unpolished computer programmer (Dany Boon) threatened by the machinations of her malevolent son (Vincent Lacoste).

Much Loved

Controversially banned in Morocco for its “contempt for moral values,” Nabil Ayouch’s portrait of several female sex workers in Marrakech offers a candid and unblinking picture of a subculture that it’s a perilous job to represent on screen.

My King

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Maïwenn & Louis Garrel on 3/9, intro by Maïwenn on 3/10

Emmanuelle Bercot (winner of Best Actress at Cannes) and Vincent Cassel give a pair of harrowingly committed, nerve-fraying performances in actor-director Maïwenn’s fourth feature, a 10-year survey of a turbulent romance.

The New Kid

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Rudi Rosenberg on 3/7

In this delectable and vivacious debut feature, shy 14-year-old Benoît (Réphaël Ghrenassia) moves to Paris and a new high school, where he’s rejected by his cooler classmates and reluctantly sidelined into a precarious friendship with the “freaks and geeks.”

Parisienne

Q&A with Danielle Arbid

The luminous fourth feature from Danielle Arbid (In the Battlefields, NYFF42) stars promising newcomer Manal Issa as a intrepid and self-possessed young Lebanese woman restlessly accommodating herself to her new home in Paris during the mid-’90s.

Standing Tall

Q&A with Emmanuelle Bercot at 3:30pm screening; intro at 9pm screening

Emmanuelle Bercot’s latest feature, which opened last year’s Cannes, is a candid, sympathetic, impassioned study of a teenage delinquent (Rod Paradot) trying to get on the right track with the help of a warm-hearted juvenile court judge (Catherine Deneuve) and a devoted social worker (Benoît Magimel).

Story of Judas

U.S. Premiere

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche boldly renders the final days of Jesus of Nazareth from the perspective of Judas Iscariot in this utterly novel reenvisioning of the Passion story, yielding a strikingly stylized period work that marks a ravishing and fascinating new addition to the Jesus film canon. Winner of a Jury Prize in the Forum section at last year’s Berlinale.

Summertime

A portrait of a young woman caught between her conservative rural parents and the older Parisian feminist organizer she’s come to love, Catherine Corsini’s prizewinning new melodrama ventures confidently and gracefully into fraught emotional territory. A Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016 selection.

Three Sisters

U.S. Premiere · Introduction by producer Marie Balducchi

For her latest project, commissioned by Arte and starring members of the Comédie-Française, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (A Castle in Italy, Rendez-Vous 2014) shot an idiosyncratic, half-modernized adaptation of one of Chekhov’s greatest, most expansively melancholy plays.

Two Friends

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Louis Garrel on 3/6, intro on 3/7

The much-anticipated feature-length directorial debut by Louis Garrel strikes a pitch-perfect balance between tragedy and charm, with Garrel starring as a gas-station attendant with literary ambitions who enters into a manic love triangle with his best friend Vincent (Vincent Macaigne) and a convict working at a pastry counter in the Gare du Nord (Golshifteh Farahani).

Winter Song

U.S. Premiere

Georgian master and NYFF regular Otar Iosseliani’s latest is a caustic and extremely funny well-stocked encyclopedia of human variety, eccentricity, and folly, elevated by an exquisite cast that include Rufus, Pierre Étaix, and Mathieu Amalric.

Free Talks: Isabelle Huppert

Sponsored by HBO®

Co-starring alongside Gérard Depardieu in this year’s Opening Night film Valley of Love, Isabelle Huppert will sit down to discuss the multitudinous career of one of the most popular French actresses of her generation.

Free Talks: Melvil Poupaud

Sponsored by HBO®

Actor-director Melvil Poupaud will talk about his latest role in The Great Game, as well as his collaborations with such visionaries as Raúl Ruiz, Eric Rohmer, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan.

Free Talks: French Touch Composers

Sponsored by HBO®

Composers Grégoire Hetzel (Summertime), Nicolas Jaar (Dheepan), Morgan Kibby (Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)), Mathieu Lamboley (Lolo), and Mark Snow (best known for The X-Files theme music, as well as his work with Alain Resnais) will discuss their craft. Moderated by Variety’s Elsa Keslassy.

Free Talks: French Comedy with Julie Delpy

Sponsored by HBO®

Writer, director, actor, and composer Julie Delpy—who brings her cross-cultural black comedy Lolo to this year’s Rendez-Vous—will sit down to discuss her experiences with humor on both sides of the camera.