Stetson University hosts French Film Festival

By Special to the Beacon

posted Mar 13, 2013 - 2:46:53pm

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Stetson University, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences and the French American Cultural Exchange, is proud to announce the lineup for the first annual French Film Festival. The Festival will be held from Wednesday, March 20, through Wednesday, April 10, with the opening screening held at the historic Athens Theatre in Downtown DeLand and subsequent screenings around the Stetson campus.

The Festival will open with a very special screening of the Academy Award-winning film The Artist (2011) at the Athens Theatre, which itself opened in 1922 with vaudeville performances and a movie projection.

Fittingly, Michel Hazanavicius’s mostly silent film is a loving homage to vaudeville and silent-era Hollywood.

The film opens in 1927, when preening matinee idol George Valentin is still the top draw at Kinograph Studios. George acts as a mentor to Peppy Miller, a chorus girl with big ambitions. The Artist tracks both Peppy’s ascent and George’s decline as he refuses to acknowledge the “talkies” as more than a passing fad. The film won 5 Academy Awards in 2012 including “Best Picture”.

Other highlights of the festival include a screening of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) which takes viewers inside the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the south of France to see some the 30,000 year-old cave paintings thought of as the first human works of art. Screening on April 4 at the Rinker Environmental Learning Center on Stetson campus, complimentary vintage 3D glasses will be provided.

On Holocaust Remembrance day, Monday, April 10, the festival will continue with the gripping documentary As a young girl of 13 (2011) in which French-Jewish woman Simone Lagrange tells the story of her family’s roundup and deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and her survival against all odds. Her testimony helped bring Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to justice some forty years later.

Post-screening discussions will be facilitated by Stetson faculty along with each screening, providing audience members with a chance to learn about the film and engage in meaningful dialogue.

Tickets for the general public to attend individual screenings are $7.50 for adults, $5 for seniors, and $3 for children.

Tickets for The Artist screening are available at the Athens Theatre and online at www.athensdeland.com. Sponsorship opportunities and group rates are available and donations to the Festival are always appreciated. Please visit contact festival organizer, Robert Watson at rwatson@stetson.edu or visit the Festival website at www.stetson.edu/artsci/languages/frenchfilmfestival.php for more information.

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