Four Days of French Cinema

For no particular reason, I have been watching a random run of French films new and old – catching up on things I’d never seen, following up on some leads from previous, recent work. That previous work was at the Summer Film School in Antwerp during July, where Cristina Álvarez and I have been lecturing for the past decade (we took over the regular gig that David Bordwell, and before him others, had). Since the Guest of Honour at the 2025 event was French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (nice guy!), I came to face to face with a ‘mediatic phenomenon’ that, somehow, I had managed to bypass almost entirely during my 1990s filmgoing and film-writing: the touted ‘Young French Cinema’ of that period at the helm of which Desplechin, for various reasons, was often positioned.