Hopkins's annual Tournées Festival of Contemporary French Cinema launched its third year on Tuesday. The festival showcases six recent French films that address an array of political questions and social issues.
Around $200,000 in grant support from the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE), in association with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, helps to fund the Tournées Festival on college and university campuses across America. Each year, FACE selects around forty contemporary French film offerings that the individual campus festivals can choose from.
On the Homewood campus, the French section of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures formed a committee of professors, graduate students and post doctorates to oversee preparations for the festival. Suzanne Roos, a senior lecturer of French Language and Cinema at Hopkins, views the diversity of the committee as an asset in the film selection process.
"I think they have a very clear sense of what films are the most likely to interest other students at Hopkins," Roos wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.
The committee continually works to ensure that students are actively involved in all aspects of the festival.
"To ensure the greatest variety and level of engagement among our students, we polled our students," Roos wrote.
In the end, students enrolled in French language and culture courses at Hopkins chose two films: Potiche and Of Gods and Men.
The Tournées Festival is a truly unique event because it connects Hopkins students with members of the larger Baltimore community outside of the university, allowing for a diverse group of people and interesting panel discussions.
"In years past, we were impressed by how actively spectators engaged in the discussions that followed most of the films," Roos wrote.
The committee designed this year's program with an eclectic mix of films spanning a variety of genres and subjects. The festival appeals to both traditional cinephiles and those interested in the interaction between French cinema and contemporary issues in politics and society.
"Screening films that address social issues and framing them with discussions led by scholars in relevant disciplines also lets us attract students from other fields of study, who are not necessarily taking courses in French, as well as people from the larger community — a group that often includes local political activists," Roos wrote.
The festival opened with The Illusionist, an animated film by Sylvain Chomet. Karen Yasinsky, a member of the Film and Media Studies Program, as well as an award-winning animator and artist, presented the inaugural film.
"We are happy to open up the festival with what we hope will be one of the most accessible films on the program," Roos wrote.
On Wednesday, Feb. 29, Anand Pandiam, a professor of Anthropology at Hopkins, presented a film called A Prophet. This film appealed to those who were interested in the social issues that surround the prison world.
The third film of the festival, Claire Denis's White Material, will be presented on Thursday, Mar. 1. A panel discussion led by Matt Porterfield, a lecturer of Film and Media Studies; Laura Mason, a senior lecturer of Film and Media Studies and History and Anne Eakin Moss, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Center and Film and Media Studies. Last year, Denis's 35 Shots of Rum was one of the most popular films the Tournées Festival screened.
"Our discussion last year was one of the most prolonged and interesting that we have ever had at the Tournées Festival, attracting a lively mix that included faculty members and graduate students from disciplines such as Film and Media Studies and the Humanities Center, local filmmakers and fans of independent film, and people from the Baltimore community interested in the issues of race and culture so central both to the work of Claire Denis and the experience of living in Baltimore," Roos wrote.
The first week of the Tournées Festival will close on Friday, Mar. 2 with a musical by Christophe Honoré called Love Songs. John Astin, a Hollywood actor and the Director of the Theatre Arts & Studies Program at Hopkins, will introduce this film. Astin is notorious for his role as Gomez Addams on The Addams Family.
On Monday, Mar. 5, Potiche, a comedy chosen by Hopkins students through a poll, will kick off the second week of the Tournées Festival. Laura Mason, who is also involved in the panel discussion of White Material, will present this film.
The Tournées Festival will end on Thursday, Mar. 8 with the screening Of Gods and Men, presented by William Eggington and Kristin Cook-Gailloud, both from the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Hopkins. Of Gods and Men is another film that was selected by Hopkins students via a poll.
The first two showings of this year's Tournées Festival were a success, attracting good, engaged audiences. The remainder of the festival promises to provide Hopkins students with an interesting way of taking a break from the monotony of studying.
The festival sponsors include the Johns Hopkins University Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Anthropology, the Program in Film and Media Studies, and Centre Pluridisciplinaire Louis Marin. All films are free and begin at 7:30 pm on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. Films are shown in French with English subtitles.
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