The Festival of Films in French: A Dive into Language and Culture

The halls leading to the Union Theatre were filled with pleased faces last Friday after the first showing for the 18^th annual UW-Milwaukee Festival of Films in French. This year’s festival is the biggest yet, boasting 17 unique and carefully selected films.

Many stood and discussed the films they had seen, while others waited eagerly for the next to begin. Fabienne Bullot, the coordinator of the festival stood with other organizers of the event, happy to see the turnout.

The festival was founded by Gabrielle Verdier and the UWM French Program in 1988, and since, with the help of the Alliance Française, has grown a loyal following, growing a little more every year, according to Bullot.

Bullot is the organizer of this year’s festival. She is also a professor in the French department at UWM, and a native Parisienne. She worked several years in France as an editor for scholarly articles before starting her career in academia. After years of teaching French language and literature, and developing a French theater program, Bullot started teaching at UWM.

Bullot, along with others, handpicked the films to represent a variety of French and Francophone cultures and ideals.

“Putting together a program for a film festival involves a certain amount of chemistry,” said Bullot.  “It requires expertise, but also involves serendipity. You have to give yourself constraints to arrive at a cohesive program.”

Audience members are also a factor of the decision making, since not all are French speakers, but just like to listen. Many community members were just returning from vacations in Paris, wanting to get a little taste of vacation back home.

Dominic and Donna Leon, of Wauwatosa, have been to the festival twice before and are avid fans.

“The movies are always great,” said Donna Leon. “[French] is a beautiful language and I love to listen to it.”

While some community members came to listen and enjoy, some students came to listen and learn, like Mica Chenault, a student at UWM studying French.

The language is an important aspect of the festival itself, but maybe even more important is the depiction of French and Francophone cultures. Bullot believes the underlying, and less obvious, theme to all the films has to do with representing and spotlighting a culture many audience members have never been exposed to.

“They [the films] all respond in a variety of ways to the question “how can we represent reality?” said Bullot. “Both feature films and documentaries are indispensable tools to understand contemporary society.

Many involved in the festival are happy to see the amount of people who take an interest in actively exposing themselves to new cultures through the festival.

“It’s encouraging to see people in Milwaukee experiencing different cultures,” said Eric Anderson, a professor in the French Department at UWM. “And it’s fun to see how they are observed.”

The films represent a wide range of French and Francophone cultures from many countries, from multicultural France to Belgium and Quebec. The festival also spotlights a wide range of social issues, like poverty, warfare, politics and gender roles.

The opening night film, Hold Back, exposed viewers to the racial tensions that take place in modern-day Paris, while telling a raw love story of young lovers trying to make it despite their cultural differences.

The festival partnered with the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center and UWM’s Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies to present the film Wooden Crosses which touches on issues of war, as well at Natan, a film concentrating on issues of cinema and politics in 1930’s France.

The Festival of Films in French takes place at the UWM Union Theatre through Feb. 15 and is free to the public.