Language: French – Wimbledon Film Club

Beau Travail

Claire Denis’ sensual, impressionistic masterpiece – loosely based on ‘Billy Budd’, relocated to a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti – was voted 7th Greatest Film of All Time in Sight & Sound’s Critics Poll 2022.
Two of Us

A decades-long secret relationship is threatened when tragedy strikes. A “moving tribute to love’s ability to overcome all obstacles” Variety
Paris, 13th District

Émilie meets Camille, who is attracted to Nora, who crosses paths with Amber … while they all try to figure out what to do with their lives.
Breathless

A classic of the French New Wave, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) was Godard’s debut feature film, a career breakthrough for Belmondo and a career recovery for Seberg after her travails in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse.
Tomboy

Summer holidays are when young people can find the freedom to push boundaries and explore their identity; relocating to a new home and school can let them change how they are perceived.
My Life as a Courgette

A neglected 9-year-old boy lands in a rural home for orphans, where he finds that everyone has a personal story to rival his own. Written in episodic monologue, Gilles Paris’ novel Autobiography of a Courgette (2002) is retold in a “stop motion” film that captivated audiences around the world. Trained in illustration and computer graphics,…
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

This classical yet radical romantic period drama set shortly before the French Revolution is the fourth feature from 40 year old French auteur Celine Sciamma, who has described it as a “manifesto on the female gaze”. Sciamma has described the film’s title as deliberately evoking the work of a writer she loves, Henry James, “who…
Transit

Transit is based on a 1944 novel by German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers, who draws on her own experience as a refugee. Petzold situates the drama in an historically indeterminate moment, superimposing past and present. There are no period trappings; the opening sirens could be sounding today, and the soldiers storming Paris look like contemporary French…
Faces Places

Unlikely couple 88 year-old director Agnes Varda and photographer and muralist JR (33) create a visual essay on the French in this quirkiest of road movies. Travelling throughout France with a box truck equipped with a portable photo booth and printing facility, they take photographs of the people they meet and places they see, and…
Frantz

A change of tone again from prolific director Ozon, (Potiche, 8 Women, Swimming Pool) this time a romantic mystery with a plot that twists and turns like a slinky. French veteran, Adrien, journeys to a small German village a year after the end of World War I, to visit the grave of his friend Frantz…