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One of the key initiatives of the American French Film Festival is its long-running education program, which provides 3,000 high school students each year with the opportunity to attend a screening and discussion with filmmakers at the DGA Theatre. For the festival, it’s a rare opportunity to help actively develop younger audiences and expose them to French cinema.
“At a time when everyone is on their phones and in-person interactions are declining, the American French Film Festival Education Program inspires students to truly engage,” says Anouchka van Riel, Deputy Director of TAFFF. “Through our screenings and Q&As with French actors and filmmakers at the DGA Theatre, as well as in-class materials we develop with educators, this effective annual program continues to encourage thoughtful discussion and nurture a new generation of French film enthusiasts.”
This year will mark the 17th year of its High School Screenings Program, and the festival is set to screen The Count of Monte Cristo, a 2024 period drama based on the 1844 novel of the same name by Alexander Dumas, to students across a five-day period from October 28. Students from more than 60 different schools – largely from Southern California but, this year, some as far as Park City, Utah – will descend each day at the DGA Theatre to watch the Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière directed epic, which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year followed by a Q&A with talent. Samuel Goldwyn is releasing the title in the U.S. on December 20.
For the festival, which is produced by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a collaboration between the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM) and the Writers Guild of America (WGAW), this initiative has long been considered one of the crown jewels of the event.
At the core of this partnership, says French native van Riel, is “cultural exchange.”
“I grew up with screenings like this,” she says. “The French ecosystem is very different with a subsidized economy towards culture. At the American French Film Festival, we are deeply passionate about cultural exchanges and how you can create bridges between people all around the world through art and stories and this is one way we can do this for younger audiences.”
The initiative was originally the idea of festival director François Truffart, who wanted to invite students to participate in the French film offerings the festival produced each year. Pascal Ladreyt, who runs the nonprofit foundation European Languages and Movies in American (ELMA), came aboard to help make the idea a reality.
“What we do at ELMA is try to help smaller, independent festivals boost their offerings,” he says. “When we launched these high school screenings with the American French Film Festival, it was amazingly successful from the beginning. Most programs you usually have to wait a couple of years, so people hear about it and get interested, but this wasn’t the case here. Our first screenings were immediately full, and we had a waiting list.”
He adds: “Foreign movies tend to be for edging cinephiles, and we all do the best we can to attract the younger audience, but this was hitting them from the get-go.”
In the last 16 years, more than 35,000 students have attended the festival’s High School Screenings program, a figure that van Riel is proud of. “It’s called an educational program for a reason – because we really wanted to open young people’s minds in this city and make it available for everyone.”
The program is open to more than 300 teachers and schools in Los Angeles and beyond – both public and private schools with different geographical locations and from different economic backgrounds. “We have people coming from as far as Santa Barbara where they leave early and take the bus down,” says van Riel.
While she notes that foreign language offerings available on streaming platforms has been a “game changer” for the foreign language content game, it’s important for the festival to continue to offer a film on the big screen to younger audiences.
“At the core of what we are trying to do is bring French content to a younger audience and, of course, with subtitles now not being as much of a hinderance as we thought before, it’s been a game changer,” she says. “But it’s important to us that this program remains a commitment to the big screen experience for us and a bring a renewal of audiences for foreign films.”
Howard Rodman, a former president of the Writers Guild of America West and Franco-American Cultural Fund board member, says the program is a great way to pay homage to the influence French cinema has had on American cinema.
“I think there’s a real cultural debt American cinema owes to French filmmaking whether it be Agnès Varda in the French New Wave or going further back to Louis Feuillade or Alice Guy-Blaché, it’s more and more apparent,” he says. “With this program, we wanted to find a way to make French films – in particular the cross-cultural conversation that has enriched the cinema culture of both nations – vital for a new generation, who are digital natives and for whom seeing movies in a theatre may be an exception rather than the rule.”
The American French Film Festival takes place October 29-November 4, 2024.
