This semester, French Around the Corner is hosting its first-ever Francophone Film Festival in collaboration with the Spurlock Museum, Institut Français and the Villa Albertine. The festival, which began Sept. 12, features a French-language film every two weeks and will conclude Dec. 5.
The Spurlock Museum shows the movies for free and welcomes both French and non-French speakers by adding English subtitles. The movie selections expand the definition of French culture, bringing to light the country’s global diversity.
“French is a lot more than metropolitan France and the Eiffel Tower,” said Aurore Mroz, professor in LAS and director of French Around the Corner.
French Around the Corner is a public research project that helps make French language speaking more equal and accessible to the Champaign-Urbana community. The project puts on free French classes for children ages 3-11, hosts conversations for adult speakers and is expanding French language books at public libraries in the area.
The festival aims to present community members with narratives of Francophone culture that are not easily accessible to mainstream audiences. According to the organizers, they intentionally chose movies that are difficult to access in the United States.
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The second featured film for adults was “Six pieds sur Terre” from Algerian-born director Karim Bensalah. Bensalah tells the story of a diplomat’s son who gets a job at a Muslim funeral home to avoid being deported from France. He helps to perform ghusl mayyit, the washing and wrapping of the deceased before burial, forcing the young man to connect with his culture in a new way.
Robert Barthell, junior in Engineering, appreciated the uniqueness of Bensalah’s narrative.
“Hollywood is devoid of originality and creativity,” Barthell said. “Foreign films expose you to different cultures and languages.”
Francophone cultural identity is being explored in Bensalah’s film through themes of death, grief and familial connection.
“We speak different languages, we have different cultures and customs, (but) we also have very similar experiences, no matter who we are or what we look like,” said Nico Norris, a graduate student studying French.
Norris, along with the Graduate Student Organization, collaborated with Aurore Mroz and French Around the Corner to start the festival. They coincidentally found each other on a Zoom call for the Albertine Cinématèque, a grant from the French Consulate. The grant funds the screening of six French-language movies at American universities.
The graduate students were looking to show movies for adults, while Mroz wanted to show children’s movies, adding to her public research project, French Around the Corner.
Mroz explained that they chose to combine their efforts, with her focusing on the children’s movies while the graduate students focused on adult movies. The showings alternate between a kids’ movie and an adult movie on a biweekly basis, providing a space for Francophones of all ages.
Mroz said the need to create spaces for French speakers in the community has become increasingly urgent as the local Francophone population continues to grow.
“We’re completely underprepared,” Mroz said. “We have a huge influx of francophone speakers; it’s a tsunami that a lot of people are not seeing coming.”
The Francophone community in C-U is diverse, consisting of people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Algeria, France, Belgium, Canada and more.
“All the work needs to be done,” Mroz said. “It starts with things like the Francophone Film Festival to value not just the language, but also the culture, the representation that these French-speaking populations from Champaign-Urbana are bringing with them.”
According to Mroz, the movies stray away from focusing on “the typical old, white, Parisian man” and bring in female characters and characters of color, allowing the diverse community the opportunity to see a representation of themselves.
For Norris, the movies help to diversify students’ skewed perceptions of French culture.
“When you are a student taking French, you’re thinking, ‘We’re gonna talk about Paris and baguettes,’” Norris said.
These limited perceptions reflect larger stereotypes about the French language and culture.
“French suffers from ‘prestige,’” Mroz said. “People tend to have a caricatural view of (the) French; it tends to be positive.”
The movie attempts to deconstruct this glamorized view. They show issues that Americans also bear witness to, like police brutality, death and family tensions.
“It’s easy to overlook humanity — the human experience — and how there’s a lot of similarities,” Norris said.
The festival will conclude its adult movies on Nov. 5 with “Un petit frère,” a story that follows a family who immigrates to the Parisian suburbs from the Ivory Coast.
The Francophone Film Festival is planning to return to campus next semester with six new films.
