When Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw (2017) was shown at Toronto’s Film Festival, paramedics were called to the scene after cinema-goers fainted during the screening. Raw tells the story of highly gifted 16-year-old…
read morehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ1rmOYLr2U [1] Ernest and Celestine[2] (2012) is a French animated film that presents the unorthodox relationship between a bear and a mouse. Introduced as a struggling musician, Ernest is starving and on…
read moreThe animated film Ernest and Celestine[1] (2012) uses animals to offer a socio-political examination of French society. A predator-prey construct is conveyed through the division of social classes in the species contrast between…
read moreThe release of Mon Oncle (Gaumont, France) in 1958 saw the return of Monsieur Hulot to cinema screens, following the successful Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot five years previously. The…
read moreMon Oncle (1958), as many of Jacques Tati’s films, focuses on the character of Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling but lovable man who fights a constant battle against the modern architecture…
read moreOne of the most enigmatic scenes in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, an exploration of social tensions and police brutality in the banlieues (council estates) of Paris in the 1990s, occurs…
read moreAu Hasard Balthazar (dir. Robert Bresson, 1966) juxtaposes the human treatment of animals with animal camaraderie between different species, emphasising a human/animal divide and how we think of animals as one…
read moreWeekend (1967), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (watch the full film with English subtitles here) Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend follows the distinctly middle-class experience of Roland and Corinne as they take a trip to Corinne’s…
read moreJean Dujardin as George Valentin, Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller and Uggie the dog in The Artist The Artist (2011) is a remarkable modern day silent film that explores the transformation of…
read moreBelle and Sébastien is an action and adventure children’s film that touches on animal bond and servitude. During the era of German soldiers raiding French towns for Jewish refugees, the…
read more- 1
- 2