Schedule of Events:

1:00 PM: And Their Children After Them - Walter Reade Theater
Ludovic Boukherma , Zoran Boukherma / 2024 / France / French with English subtitles / 140 minutes

Taking place against the backdrop of widespread deindustrialization in ’90s France, And Their Children After Them dramatizes the long-lasting consequences for two boys following a fight at a party. Anthony (Paul Kircher) is the son of a stern, embittered alcoholic father (Gille Lellouche) and disconnected mother (Ludivine Sagnier); coming from a differently fraught family background, Moroccan immigrant Hacine (Sayyid El Alami) is more vulnerable before the law. One of the most important French novels of recent years, Nicolas Mathieu’s 2018 winner of the prestigious French literary award Prix Goncourt comes to epic life in this adaptation from twin writer-directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma. Inspired equally by the works of Émile Zola and Bruce Springsteen, the Boukhermas anchor their saga with pitch-perfect realism in a vividly evoked mid-’90s period setting. At the film’s center is Kircher, who, following breakout roles in Winter Boy (Rendez-Vous 2023) and Animal Kingdom (Rendez-Vous 2024), confirms his promise as one of the most charismatic and compelling young actors in France today.

4:00 PM: The Second Act - Walter Reade Theater
Quentin Dupieux / 2024 / France / French with English subtitles / 80 minutes

A movie-within-a-movie (or is it?), the latest quirkily imaginative feature from Quentin Dupieux (Smoking Causes Coughing, Rendez-Vous 2023) is, among other things, a showcase for some of France’s most talented working performers to riff on their own personas to hilarious effect. Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard are among the actors attempting to make their way through the production of a movie none of them seems to like very much. Repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and irreverently lampooning everything from AI to Paul Thomas Anderson, Dupieux’s meta-movie—the opening night selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—is an ebullient and thought-provoking behind-the-scenes comedy that gleefully deconstructs itself, inciting plenty of belly laughs along the way.

6:00 PM: Foreign Tongue - Walter Reade Theater
Claire Burger / 2024 / France/Germany / French and German with English subtitles / 101 minutes

When Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) meets her German pen pal Lena (Josefa Heinsius), their initial rapport is rocky: the shy, insecure French teen has arrived from Strasbourg for an extended visit at a difficult moment for the more assertive Lena. With time, however, the two girls’ relationship grows and deepens into real friendship; when Lena agrees to visit Fanny in France, their shared interest in political activism takes a troubling turn. In her third feature, Claire Burger (co-director of Party Girl, Rendez-Vous 2015) casts an up-to-the-moment eye on two young women exploring their desires and discovering themselves in the context of dangerously charged political and societal circumstances. With outstanding supporting performances from Nina Hoss and Chiara Mastroianni as the two girls’ mothers, Foreign Tongue is at once intimate in its portrait of two differently wounded girls at vulnerable moments in their lives, and thrilling in the unexpected revelations and twists that propel the two through the upheavals of young adulthood.

8:45 PM: Meeting with Pol Pot - Walter Reade Theater
Rithy Panh / 2024 / France/Cambodia/Taiwan/Qatar/Turkey / French and Cambodian with English subtitles / 112 minutes

In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture—historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it—that only Panh could make. A Strand Releasing release.

Ticket Prices:

General Public: $19
Students, Seniors, and Persons with Disabilities: $17
FLC Members: $14
Opening Night - General Public: $25
Opening Night - FLC Members: $20

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