The 2024 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Film at Lincoln Centre’s annual showcase of some of the best francophone films, features many small gems of the festival circuit, including Banel & Adama, Ama Gloria, and a Real Job.
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Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Film at Lincoln Centre’s annual showcase of some of the best francophone films, is a must-attend event for all francophile cinephiles. In addition to offering an early preview of films that have secured distribution, like this year’s Berlinale winner On the Adamant and the Cannes Competition first feature Banel & Adama, it’s also the rare opportunity to see films that may never screen in the US again. At least half of the films at this year’s festival don’t have a US distributor.
Some of the best films I’ve seen at the festival over the years — from Mikhaël Hers’s fantastic Amanda (2019), about a young man and his niece recovering from a Parisian terrorist attack that killed his sister, to Philippe Faucon’s taut Algerian War movie, Les harkis (2022) — have yet to screen in the US again. Other great films get such a quiet release that you might not even hear about them. In 2023, the festival screened two of the best films of the year, which are still under the radar: Other People’s Children (2022) and Revoir Paris (2022).
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema is the festival where I first discovered Faucon’s work with the tender family drama Fatima (2015) and further cemented my Vincent Lacoste fandom with films like Lolo (2016), Amanda (where he gave one of the best performances of the year), and The Freshman (2019) by Thomas Lilti who has reteamed with Lacoste this year for A Real Job (2023).
What to see at the 2024 Rendez-Vous With French Cinema
Below are capsule reviews of the festival’s highlights I’ve seen so far, from must-sees to not-so-great curios worth seeing for the performances if you like the actors.
All To Play For (dir. Delphine Deloget)
It’s a testament to the brilliance of Virginie Efira that she can take an irredeemable script and make it at least watchable in Delphine Deloget’s All to Play For. Efira plays an irresponsible single mother who leans too heavily on her teenage son (Félix Lefebvre of Summer of ‘85) to do the parenting and care for her youngest son. When she comes under investigation from child welfare services, Deloget does a commendable job of exposing the gaps in the system and problematic policies that can make a bad situation worse. Unfortunately, Efira’s character is so thoughtless and self-absorbed that it’s hard to invest in her as a good mother who has only been hurt by the system. I’m not sure she should be a parent, either. The film’s ending is meant to be emotional, but it’s mostly just one frustration after another.
Films We Like will release All to Play for in Canada in 2024.
Àma Gloria (dir. Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq)
Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq’s Ama Gloria, her first feature as a solo filmmaker (she co-directed 2014’s Party Girl) is a touching, sentimental film about the bond between a young French girl, Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani) and her nanny from Cape Verde, Gloria (Ilça Morena) Cléo’s mother died years before, and Gloria moved to France to earn a living to support her two children back home, whom she now hardly knows. Told mostly from Cléo’s perspective, Amachoukeli-Barsacq keeps the camera low at her sightline, often with shallow focus, as she’s someone still discovering the world.
To my knowledge, Àma Gloria is still seeking North American distribution.
Banel & Adama (Ramata Toulaye-Sy)
First-time filmmaker Ramata Toulaye-Sy’s (co-screenwriter of Seventh Row favourite Our Lady of the Nile) story of star-crossed lovers in a remote village in Senegal is a visually stunning tale of bucking convention and paying the price. The film was on our list of the best acquisition titles at TIFF 2023, and has since been picked up by Kino Lorber for North American distribution. There’s a touching love story at the centre of this slice-of-life drama about local tradition, magic, and superstitions. The script and pacing are uneven, but Toulaye-Sy compensates with stunning images. When the film opens with home, the colours are saturated, and as things get more and more bleak, the colours become increasingly desaturated until everything is washed out like the sand.
Kino Lorber will release Banel & Adama later this year.
First Case (Victoria Musiedlak)
Victoria Musiedlak’s feature debut First Case is a character study of a young lawyer (Noée Abita) coming of age when she gets involved with the volatile and married police inspector (Anders Danielsen Lie) working on her murder case. But I spent most of the film wondering why I should care about this unbelievably naive twenty-six-year-old woman as she discovers that clients lie and her very obviously bad news paramour is indeed a bad idea. The very talented Abita does what she can with the story of a power-imbalanced relationship with a mercurial man. But she’s given much less to work with than in Slalom, where she played a teenager getting raped by her skiing coach. Lie is particularly good at expressing the officer’s seething anger and quiet violence, but it’s within a narrow range I’ve seen him do before.
To my knowledge, First Case is still seeking US distribution.
Sisterhood (dir. Nora El Hourch)
Nora El Hourch’s directorial debut made my TIFF 2023 list of the best acquisition titles at the festival, and to my knowledge, it is still seeking distribution.
Here’s an excerpt from my review: “Nora El Hourch’s directorial debut is a thoughtful story about how saying #metoo still has class and racial barriers. Like the Seventh Row favourite The Teachers’ Lounge, Sisterhood is also about how well-meaning intervention in a problem you don’t understand can worsen things. When white-passing Amina (Léah Aubert) learns that a local teenage boy has sexually threatened her friend Zineb (Salma Takaline), she decides to enact her own kind of justice — anonymously exposing his predation online. But there are many unintended consequences of this supposed heroic act, which highlight the divisions of privilege between Amina, Zineb, and their best friend Djeneba (Médina Diarra).”
Related reading/listening to 2024 Rendez-Vous With French Cinema
More recent French Cinema: Four French films directed by women made our list of the Best Films of 2023. Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris and Rebeca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children both screened at last year’s Rendez-Vous. We also loved Claire Simon’s documentary Our Body and Sandrine Kiberlain’s A Radiant Girl. Éric Gravel’s thriller about a single mother, Full Time, also made the list.
More past highlights from Rendez-Vous with French cinema: Our #3 film of 2020, Mikhaël Hers’s Amanda, has yet to secure US distribution. (It is available on VOD in Canada and the UK.) We also love Philippe Faucon’s Fatima, which screened in 2016. His most recent film, Les Harkis, is excellent and screened last year, but has yet to receive distribution
