Carleton University offered an alternative to every student’s Netflix-saturated Friday night April 4-6.
Students in film professor Tom McSorley’s fourth-year programming and curating seminar gave Carleton a break from Hollywood. The 11 seminar students put on a three-day French Film Festival in the River Building amphitheatre, showcasing five French films. Admission to the festival was free and all films played with English subtitles.
“The idea was for the students to organize a film festival. We were going through the mechanics of how you organize a film event in public,” McSorley said.
The film festival ran in collaboration with the French Embassy. No funding was used for the event, but the embassy provided McSorley’s class with 30 titles to choose from.
McSorley said Carleton’s film department has a good relationship with the embassy, which regularly makes foreign films available to university students.
“Audiences will get a completely broad range of film style and film subject. For us it’s kind of a pilot. This is what you would be doing if you worked in cinema tech or at a film festival,” McSorley said.
The festival’s opening night featured Camille Claudel, a film about an artist locked up in a psychiatric institute who tries desperately to prove her sanity.
Other films included 17 Girls, a movie about 17 girls who get pregnant at the same time, and À Moi Seule, which tells the story of a teenage girl discovering herself after being kidnapped for 10 years.
“The films that we chose are equally heavy and funny. So we wanted people to have just a really relaxing weekend where they can watch French cinema,” said Marianne Smiley, one of McSorley’s students and a master’s of film studies candidate.
Smiley said French cinema is particularly important to showcase in Canada because much of Canadian film is associated with Quebecois productions.
“Quebec has really put us in the map. You look at all the Oscar nominations like Dallas Buyers Club that won best film. That was a Quebecois director. When people think of Canadian film, it’s kind of synonymous with French-Canadian Quebec, and they’re synonymous with directors from France,” Smiley said.
“We wanted to bring a different flavour than just showing English movies,” she added.
McSorley, who is also head of the Canadian Film Institute, said this was the first year his class has put on a film festival. He said he hopes to carry out another festival next year with either an exotic or Canadian theme. He said putting on the festival was important because the artistic value of film is often overlooked.
“We talk about novels and poems, but we can also talk about movies,” he said. “It’s this idea that you get your culture out into the world and people are exposed to it and they’ll generate an interest in it.”
“It exposes you to something else. It’s not just Hollywood.”
