About the Series

Long spoken of as Maurice Pialat’s “best film” and rarely seen in theaters, La maison des bois comes to FLC in its first-ever U.S. theatrical release and in a brand-new 4K restoration. Made for French television in 1971, when Pialat was 45 and had only L’Enfance nue behind him, the seven-part series unfolds in a village north of Paris during World War I, where a gamekeeper and his wife take in three displaced Parisian boys. At its emotional center is 10-year-old Hervé, whose father is at the front and whose mother has abandoned him; through his eyes we watch a tightly bound rural community slowly unsettled by the war’s advancing shadow. Eschewing battlefields for kitchens, schoolhouses, taverns, and country roads, Pialat builds his epic from accumulating details that feels at once spontaneous and novelistic in scope. Tender yet unsentimental, it stands among the great, underseen achievements of postwar French filmmaking.

On the occasion of this long-overdue theatrical release, FLC will present three 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 great television epic. Spanning postwar foster care, late-1970s provincial adolescence, and a combustible Parisian household, these films return 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. Seen together, they form not merely a companion program but a close encounter with Pialat’s resistance to tidy psychologizing, his singular capacity to channel documentary immediacy into rigorously composed scenes, and his nerve-exposing gift for drawing performances, especially from young actors, that feel wholly lived. 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.

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