French Film Festival 2014, Ciné Lumière

This November, French Film Festival returns to London for its 22nd run. For ten days, the Ciné Lumière in South Kensington’s Institut Français will play host to sixteen of the most curious and exciting new Francophone features of the past year, many of which have yet to be screened elsewhere in Britain. With beautifully-drawn animations, intense romantic comedies and searing portraits of Third World life, the diverse programme promises something for every cinephile.
The festival opens on the 7^th November with a preview screening of School of Babel, depicting immigrant teenagers in their ‘adaptation class’, the year in which they are taught of the French language and learn to meld into France’s culture. It will be followed later that evening with Love at First Sight, a rom-com about two youths whose competitiveness leads them to sign up for an army boot camp.
November 8 brings Once in a Lifetime, following an inspiration teacher in an inner city school, and Robert Guédiguian’s Ariadne’s Thread, about a lonely middle-aged woman spending a magical day lost in Marseille.
There’s a chance to catch Abderrahmane Sissak-Unio’s Timbuktu, the highlight of the festival, on November 9. Widely regarded as a highlight of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it uses incredible cinematography to express the inequalities and privations of life in the wartorn city.
Two couples find their relationships and friendships falling apart in Weekend in Normandy (9^th), while Paris Follies (10^th) tracks a stolid farmer’s struggle to win back his flighty wife, played by the ever-shining Isabelle Huppert. Longwave (12^th), which will be bookended by a Q&A with director Lionel Baier, tells the tale of quarrelling journalists witnessing Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution.
New German auteur Volker Schlóndorff’s new film Diplomacy (12^th) is set in August 1944, as General von Choltitz prepares to blow up Paris on the Fuhrer’s orders. Welcome to Argentina (13^th) sees two Frenchmen hit the South American highways in a new spin on the road movie. Marital collapse and newfound singledom are explored in Gazelles (14^th), while Not My Type on the same night sees a professor and a hairdresser fall for each other despite their cultural differences.
The final weekend opens with the charming animation Aunt Hilda (15th), about a gardener rescuing her plants from genetically modified produce. Patchwork Family (15^th) is a spare but gentle social realist drama, while Marie’s Story (15^th) brings to the screen a true story of a deaf and blind girl in the nineteenth century. Finally, the season concludes on the 15^th and 16^th with two outings for In the Courtyard, about two aging misfits coming together. Catherine Deneuve gives a bravura performance in the lead role.