If you love to watch French films, myfrenchfilmfestival.com is the perfect website for you.
My French Film Festival is a month-long, completely online film festival. The site, run by uniFrance films, is in its fourth edition and aspires to share a love of French cinema around the world. It includes new foreign languages, new partners and several different genres of films.
Running until Feb. 17, the selections will include 10 feature films and 10 short films in the competition. All of the films are available to watch in 13 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.
For a small fee, viewers have access to this wonderful cultural resource and can watch and vote on the films they see. Feature films are available for $2.70, and the short films are $1.40.
With each film's specter rating, viewers can see which ones are the best to watch. "Comme un lion" (Little Lion) and "Le Vierge, les Coptes et Moi" (The Virgin, the Copts and Me) are currently the top-rated films.
Directed by Samuel Collardey, "Comme un lion" (Little Lion) is about a 15-year-old boy named Mitri who dreams of being a professional soccer player. After a recruiting agent picks him out, Mitri’s family spares no expense to help his dreams come true. Once in Paris, everything falls apart and his family is in debt. But the film begs the question as to whether he will make it as pro soccer star, and shows the implications and societal problems associated with this idealized career path.
"La Vierge, les Coptes et Moi" (The Virgin, the Copts, and Me) is directed by Namir Abdel Messeeh. Categorized as a comedic documentary/autobiographical fiction, the film shows Namir as he returns to his Egyptian origins to make a film about the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Christian Copt community. In the end, it becomes a comedy about beliefs, roots and making movies.
The top-rated short film is "Mademoiselle Kiki et les Montparnos" (Kiki of Montparnasse). The animated short film is only a little over 14 minutes long — the prefect amount of time to take a break from studying. The short follows the story of Kiki de Montparnasse, who was a model for major avant-garde painters of the early 20th century. She went on to become a painter, a press cartoonist, a writer and a cabaret singer.
These films serve as an excellent distraction from studying, but more importantly, as an opportunity to be exposed to a different culture and practice hearing and understanding a completely new language.
Reach the reporter at Mercedes.Santana@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @MercedesMS17
