While you might be planning a trip to Century 24 this weekend to check out the hyper-violent “Kick-Ass,” or Neil LaBute’s ridiculous-looking take on ”Death at a Funeral,” you might consider attending ”The Class.” Don’t worry, it’s not an actual class, even though it is presented in Mitchell Hall room 122. It’s one of the movies running in the Tournées French Film Festival, which has graced UNM’s campus for the past few Friday nights with free, contemporary foreign cinema.
Tournées, hosted by the department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the International Studies Institute at UNM, is a series of five important, award-winning films by French, Belgian and Franco-Tunisian directors — such as Laurent Cantet, Michel Ocelot, Yves Jeuland, Abdellatif Kechiche and Agnès Varda. These aren’t familiar figures outside of the art-house circuit in the U.S. Despite this, Rajeshwari Vallury, assistant professor of French and organizer of Tournées, said that the festival has been a success.
“The audience varies according to the film,” Vallury said. “(They were) younger and family-oriented for the first film (an animated feature), but older, more established and Francophone for the second (a documentary on the Jewish community in France). It was particularly heartening to have students say that they loved the third film, about an immigrant family in France, which was 154 minutes long.”
Vallury chose the films for their aesthetics and political content “because they capture essential aspects of contemporary French society, in all its complexity and variety,” she said.
Laurent Cantet’s “The Class,” screening this Friday at 7 p.m., is in this vein. And yet what makes it such a fantastic film is its universality. It explores the relationship between a teacher and his students with resounding effect — mostly due to Cantet’s phenomenal attention to detail (he filmed meticulously over the course of more than year). He shows us, delicately, without sap or sentiment, how much we share with the characters. We’re all like François, the teacher, at some point in our lives, struggling with our convictions in the face of new challenges. And we’re all naive and rebellious at times, like the young French students, convinced we have nothing more to learn.
“The Class” and Agnès Varda’s autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès” will finish off this year’s Tournées, but Vallury is confident that the festival will return, perhaps in 2012.
“I like the present scope and size of Tournées, because it allows me to screen the films for free, which I believe is important,” she said. “The idea was never to make a profit, but to make an important cultural experience available to anyone who wanted to benefit from it.”
Organizing the festival was rewarding, Vallury said, but not without difficulty.
“It takes tremendous footwork and patience, and (it) can be stressful, especially when things go wrong at the last minute,” she said. “But the end result is always worth it. For five weeks, every Friday evening becomes a wonderful opportunity for cinema lovers and Francophiles to share a great viewing experience.”
*Tournées French Film Festival
Mitchell Hall room 122
“The Class”
Friday
7 – 9 p.m.
“The Beaches of Agnès”
April 23
7 – 9 p.m.
*
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