The French Film Festival returns from 17 to 27 November 2022, with a riveting panorama of 30 feature films. Presented as part of the vOilah! France Singapore Festival 2022 (26 October – 27 November), the 38th edition and one of its kind, continues to celebrate the best of French storytelling as the longest-running foreign film festival deeply anchored in the cultural landscape of Singapore.
Juliane Verbeck, a police commissioner in Paris, is a woman of great moral integrity. But the discovery of her husband’s double life will suddenly lead her to behaviours and acts of which she would never have believed herself capable..
10-year-old Sebastian reluctantly spends his vacation in the mountains with his grandmother and aunt. Helping them with the sheep is hardly an exciting prospect for a city boy like him—but that is without considering his encounter with Belle, a huge dog mistreated by her owner. Ready to do anything to fight injustice and to protect his new-found friend, Sebastian will spend the craziest summer of his life.
Jean, Patrick, Joanna, Romane and Guillaume have known each other for over 30 years. Their marriages and their children have not succeeded in keeping them away and this weekend, the band of fifty-somethings finds itself in Champagne for Patrick’s bachelor party, being the last bachelor of the bunch. But his wife-to-be, who arrived unexpectedly, does not exactly please to everyone… In this sublime vineyard, over the giggles, shouting matches and reconciliations, tensions rebound…
Inspired by a true story. Mathieu, a gregarious and dedicated diplomat, accepts a posting to Irkutsk as the head of Siberia’s Alliance Française. He hopes the change will be good for his family and struggling marriage, but before long Mathieu’s staging of cultural events and support of artistic expression sees him fall afoul of local authorities. Accused of a terrible crime, he soon realises someone has fabricated a case with Russia’s Federal Security Service; he has been framed. Arrested, imprisoned and isolated, Mathieu has nowhere to turn. Defending himself is impossible, the French authorities are powerless… he has only one option: to try and escape.
Somewhere between Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny lean over a large white sheet of paper and bring to life a mischievous and endearing boy, Little Nicholas. From schoolyard games and fights to summer camp prank and camaraderie, Nicholas lives a merry and enriching childhood. As the adventures of Nicholas and his friends unfold, the boy makes his way into his creators’ workshop and light-heartedly questions them. Sempé and Goscinny will recount the story of their friendship, career, and reveal a childhood filled with hopes and dreams.
The Dumars are music conductors from father to son: François is finishing a long and brilliant international career while Denis has just won yet another Classical Music Award. When François learns that he has been chosen to conduct at La Scala, his ultimate dream, his grail, he cannot believe his ears. At first thrilled for his father, Denis is quickly disillusioned when he discovers the truth: it is he, who has been chosen to go to Milan…
Notre-Dame On Fire offers a blow-by-blow recreation of the gripping events that took place on April 15, 2019, when the cathedral suffered the biggest blaze in its history. The film retraces how heroic men and women put their lives on the line to accomplish an awe-inspiring rescue.
In November 2015, a series of unprecedented and deadly attacks hits Paris. The anti-terrorist police led by Heloise—and her chief commander Fred—face an unprecedented level of pressure: in a race against the clock, they must find the perpetrators of the attacks as quickly as possible before they can strike again, travelling across Europe and beyond in one of the biggest manhunts in history.
Literally born and raised with horses, Zoe leads a happy life at her parents’ racehorse stables, driven by the dream of someday becoming a jockey like her father. To Zoe, nothing beats being with horses, especially her « best friend » Beautiful Intrigue, the stable’s prize mare, who taught the child how to walk.When Beautiful Intrigue gives birth to a foal that Zoe names Tempest, she recognises in Tempest the champion her parents have been working for all their lives. But Zoe’s dreams are shattered one stormy night, when a panicked Tempest accidentally injures the girl, leaving her permanently “disabled”.
Furious at life, Zoe slips into despair and pulls her entire family down with her, especially her father, who is on the verge of losing everything. But with the unconditional support of her family and the help of Seb, a stable hand with a gift for communicating with horses, Zoe will seek to conquer the impossible, in pursuit of her dream.
Tony, a bus driver in his 50s, is going through a midlife crisis. He lives alone, having abandoned his wife and baby decades earlier. Deciding to reconnect with his daughter who has become a dance teacher, Tony signs up for her classes, even though he hates dancing and has two left feet.A touching film telling the story of a father desperate to reconnect with his daughter and correct the mistakes of his past, Rumba Therapy sheds a tenderly funny light on father-daughter relationships in adulthood.
The biopic about Simone Veil, one of the prominent women in France in the 20th Century. Simone Veil’s life story, from her childhood to her major political battles, seen through the pivotal events of the twentieth century. An intimate and epic portrait of an extraordinary woman who eminently challenged and transformed her era: her humanist message is still keenly relevant today.
While working part-time as a food deliveryman, Antoine, an aspiring young rapper from the suburbs of Paris, meets Mrs. Loyseau, an eminent teacher at the Paris Opéra. Stunned by the young man’s raw talent, she introduces him to the world of opera. As Antoine becomes one of Mrs. Loyseau’s students, he hides his new dream from his friends and family, fearing that they won’t understand – this double life burdens him… Somewhere in between the gilded and uptight Parisian upper-class, and the harsh yet free-spirited and familiar suburbs he grew up in, Antoine will have to find his own voice.
February 1927: the funeral of Marcel Péricourt, the most powerful banker in Paris. Madeleine is to inherit his financial empire, but fate has decided otherwise. A conspiracy takes shape, aimed at robbing her of everything she has. Amidst the antagonism of the men around her, and the rampant corruption of interwar France, Madeleine must draw upon all of her intelligence and energy to survive and reconstruct her life. Her task is all the more difficult amidst the smouldering flames that threaten to ravage Europe.
French writer Emma is 27 when she decides she wants her new novel to be about prostitutes, these women no one seems to really dare to look in the eye. To understand their life at the fullest, she gets herself hired in “La Maison”, a Berlin brothel and becomes one of them. Her experience that was supposed to last only a couple of weeks, will last two years. From one room to another, from sex trade to exploration of woman fantasy, Emma discovers this hidden world: its dangers, its isolation from society and incompatibility with a love life, but also its sorority, grace, and power.
La Maison is adapted from the best-selling novel by Emma Becker. It’s her true story.
La Maison is adapted from the best-selling novel by Emma Becker. It’s her true story.
Cathy is a stubborn 40-year-old sous chef. This year, she is finally about to fulfil her lifelong dream: opening her own gastronomic restaurant. But nothing goes as planned. Facing serious financial difficulties, she reluctantly accepts a job in the cafeteria of a shelter for young migrants. While she hates her new position, Cathy’s skills and passion for cuisine start to change the kids’ lives. And they also have a lot to teach her…
Alice Launey, a French forensic expert still haunted by her past, comes to Seoul to present her work. She will meet Jin-Ho, a detective who asks for her help on a murder case. Drawn into network trafficking, she will have to face her fears.
Deep in the Pyrenees, two close friends at rock bottom have the idea of the century: to pull themselves out of their misery, they will launch a horse trekking tour, a voyage through the mountains for tourists in search of nature, silence and adventure.
The incredible story of Nadia Nadim, the former Afghan refugee who became a star player for the PSG.
It follows Nadia Nadim, born and raised in Afghanistan until the Taliban executed her father in 2000, when she was 8 years old. This marked the start of two years of exile for Nadia’s mother and her five daughters (one was still a baby). Escaping on foot, long months spent waiting in Peshawar, Pakistan, flying to Rome under false identities, travelling on trucks, the fear of not arriving in Europe all together, negotiating with smugglers and their enormous power over life and death, refugee camps and finally… a new life in Denmark. This is where Nadia began her football career, from B52 Aalborg to Fortuna Hjørring in 2012. She made her Champions League debut the same year, scoring both goals in a 2-1 win over Scottish champion Glasgow. Nadia joined PSG in January 2018.
But Nadia’s goals extend far beyond football. This multi-lingual young woman is very committed to NGOs that support women, education and refugee children. She is also a future surgeon. What Nadia wants more than anything else, is to repair humanity.
A Woman Is a Woman is a sly, playful tribute to the American musical comedy, showcasing Godard’s signature wit and intellectual acumen. The film tells the story of exotic dancer Angéla (Karina) as she attempts to have a child with her unwilling lover Émile (Brialy). In the process, she finds herself torn between him and his best friend Alfred (Belmondo). A dizzying compendium of color, humor, and the music of renowned composer Michel Legrand, A Woman Is a Woman finds the young Godard at his warmest and most accessible, reveling in and scrutinizing the mechanics of his great obsession: the cinema.
Four years after Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard reimagined the gangster film even more radically with Band of Outsiders (Bande à part). In it, two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of both of their fancies (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery—in her own home. This audacious and wildly entertaining French New Wave gem is at once sentimental and irreverent, effervescently romantic and melancholy, and it features some of Godard’s most memorable set pieces, including the headlong race through the Louvre and the unshakably cool Madison dance sequence.
There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.
Vivre sa vie was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna Karina, Godard’s greatest muse, plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute, her downward spiral depicted in a series of discrete tableaux of daydreams and dances. Featuring some of Karina and Godard’s most iconic moments—from her movie theater vigil with The Passion of Joan of Arc to her seductive pool-hall strut—Vivre sa vie is a landmark of the French New Wave that still surprises at every turn.
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and— according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.
During France’s Second Empire (1852-1870), a jobless young man named Etienne Lantier accepts work in the mines, beginning a veritable descent into hell. In the Northern mining town of Montsou, Etienne discovers wretched poverty, alcoholism and foul relationships. He encounters unscrupulous men like Chaval and generous souls like Toussaint Maheu, all of them under the lash of unholy capitalism. Lantier joins the socialist struggle for dignity, but the mine owners counterattack. When wages are cut, a huge strike is called, leading to bloodshed and starvation. In the midst of all this misery there is one bright spark: Etienne’s love for Catherine. The strike is crushed by the army, but Etienne is left with the hope that the blood will not have been shed in vain.
Set in 1973, this coming-of-age portrait follows a group of young Rwandan girls at a Belgian-run Catholic boarding school, taking inspiration from true events that would come to foreshadow the 1994 genocide during the Rwandan Civil War. Many of the girls belong to elite families, while others hold less privilege; further division is sown by ballooning anti-Tutsi rhetoric under existing Hutu rule. The terrain is tense, but in the foreground lies a bewitching yet unassuming story of colonial refusal, flanked by adolescent mischief and curiosity that is surely typical but has, in this case, much higher stakes.
Doors slam and papers fly in this off-the-wall comedy about French politics directed by master filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier). Tavernier’s blistering assault – based on the award-winning graphic novel by Abel Lanzac, a former government speech writer – zeroes in on fictional Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (a tour-de-force comic performance by Thierry Lhermitte). A human whirlwind and a man confident in France’s importance on the world stage, de Vorms takes on American neo-cons, corrupt Russians and the opportunistic Chinese while his hapless speech writer (Raphael Personnaz) endures the eccentricities of his megalomaniacal boss and his sycophantic entourage. In the vein of recent political comedies such as In the Loop, The French Minister is a hilarious send-up of diplomacy and international politics with rapid-fire dialogue and a brilliant ensemble cast.
Somewhere, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, in a country torn apart by a war… A beautiful woman in her thirties watches over her husband in a decrepit room. He is reduced to the state of a vegetable because of a bullet in the neck, and not only is he abandoned by his companions of the Jihad, but also by his brothers. One day, the woman starts a solitary confession to her silent husband. She talks about her childhood, her suffering, her frustrations, her loneliness, her dreams, her desires…
Awarded Best Documentary at the Lumières and César Awards 2021High up on the Tibetan plateau, amongst unexplored and inaccessible valleys, lies one of the last sanctuaries of the wild world where rare and undiscovered fauna lives. Vincent Munier, one of the world’s most renowned wildlife photographers, takes the adventurer and novelist Sylvain Tesson (In the Forest of Siberia) with him on his latest mission. For several weeks, they explore these valleys in search of unique animals, and try to spot the snow leopard—one of the rarest and most difficult big cats to approach.
Stéphane decides to move to the beautiful Cantal mountains to reconnect with his eight-year-old daughter Victoria, who has been mute since her mother’s death. During a walk in the forest, a shepherd gives Victoria a puppy named Mystery who will gradually give her a taste for life again. But very quickly, Stéphane discovers that the animal is in fact a wolf… Despite warnings and the danger of the situation, he cannot bring himself to separate his daughter from this seemingly harmless ball of fur.
With his tribe’s move to follow the migrating bison imminent, Yakari, the little Sioux boy, sets out on his own to follow the trail of Little Thunder, a wild mustang said to be untameable. On his journey, and alone for the first time in his life, Yakari is visited by Great Eagle, his totem animal. Great Eagle gives Yakari a magnificent feather as well as the incredible ability to speak to animals. Travelling far from home and deep into the territory of the terrible pumaskin-clad hunters, Yakari and Little Thunder undertake a great adventure to find their way back home again. Their journey, through a breath-taking but treacherous landscape, will forever seal the undying friendship between the bravest little Sioux boy and the pony who runs like the wind.