Opening and closing with two screenings at The Main

Our first screening, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, and our last screening, La Haine, will be shown at The Main Cinema. Admission is $8 in advance or $10 at the door. Street parking for the Main Cinema is most easily found on 2nd St SE, a couple of blocks away from the theatre.

Programme

Film buffs, read on!

Our summer film festival will show eight classic films spanning the years 1953 to 1995 and feature 6 different directors. From all-ages comedy to gritty dramas to iconic New Wave storytelling, this week of entertainment has something for everyone!

We are offering a $40 Cinéphile Movie Pass that includes admission to all 8 films. Secure your tickets and save when you purchase as a package deal!

Regular admission for the screenings at The Main Cinema is $8 in advance or $10 at the door (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and La Haine). Admission for the other films is $5 for the outdoor screenings at our location.

Thursday, august 18
7pm - The main cinema

Let’s kick off our festival with this 1953 French comedy starring and directed by Jacques Tati, introducing the pipe-smoking, well-meaning but clumsy character of Monsieur Hulot!

Jacques Tati’s endearing clown takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers.

Kids – if you like Mr. Bean, you’re going to love Jacques Tati’s marvelous Mr. Hulot! Don’t worry about him being French, he barely speaks; this is side-achingly funny, near silent comedy.

Friday, august 19
7pm - AFMSP

Tirez sur le pianiste is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film directed by François Truffaut. Charlie (Charles Aznavour) is a former classical pianist who now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers surface and ask for his help while on the run from gangsters, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie faces trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.

Fifty years after it was made, the film remains as exuberant, surprising, funny and touching as it did when first released. It is perhaps the most quintessentially New Wave of all Truffaut’s films, as revolutionary as Godard’s A bout de souffle and equally influential on later film-makers.

Saturday, august 20
7pm - AFMSP

Vivre sa vie (1962) was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study.

The lovely Anna Karina, Godard’s greatest muse, plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute, her downward spiral depicted in a series of discrete tableaux of daydreams and dances. Featuring some of Karina and Godard’s most iconic moments—from her movie theater vigil with The Passion of Joan of Arc to her seductive pool-hall strut—Vivre sa vie is a landmark of the French New Wave that still surprises at every turn.

Monday, august 22
7:30 pm - AFMSP

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, Jules et Jim charts, over twenty-five years, the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession.

The legendary François Truffaut directs, and Jeanne Moreau stars as the alluring and willful Catherine, whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating romantic triangles.

An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, Jules and Jim was a worldwide smash in 1962 and remains every bit as audacious and entrancing today.

Tuesday, august 23
7:30 pm - AFMSP

Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful young Frenchwoman who works at a small-town boutique selling umbrellas, falls for dashing mechanic, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). Their brief romance is interrupted when Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War. Though pregnant by Guy, Geneviève marries an older businessman, Roland (Marc Michel), and begins to move on with her life. Throughout the musical film, all the characters' dialogue is conveyed through song.

Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

Wednesday, August 24
7 pm - AFMSP

Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac) are twin sisters who each want to find romance and leave their small seaside town of Rochefort, France. Soon they befriend a couple of visiting carnival workers who frequent their lonely mother's (Danielle Darrieux) café and hire the girls to sing in the carnival. Wanting a career as a songwriter, Solange falls for an American musician, Andy, while Delphine dumps her beau and searches Rochefort for her ideal man.

Watching Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is a genuinely uplifting experience. As Godard had done with film-noir, Demy captures in this 1967 movie the spirit of the Hollywood musical, if not its well-drilled rigor, reimagining it in a French context and filtering it through his own sensibility.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25
7:30 PM - AFMSP

In Le dernier Métro, Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds—a Jewish theater manager in hiding; a leading man who’s in the Resistance; increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight—the troupe believes the show must go on. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, Le dernier métro is Truffaut’s ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity.

In 1981, the film won 10 Césars for: best film, best actor (Depardieu), best actress (Deneuve), best cinematography, best director (Truffaut), best editing, best music, best production design, best sound and best writing.

friDAY, AUGUST 26
7PM - THe main cinema

La Haine is a 1995 French crime drama film written, co-edited, and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmaoui, the film chronicles a day and night in the lives of three friends from a poor immigrant neighborhood in the suburbs of Paris.

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts.

La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.

Suitable for ages 18+