A juicy entrant in this country's ever-burgeoning film festival season, the
French Film Festival forwards eleven features heralding from that most European of film industries. If its modest offerings seem beside the point in the face of bigger international programmes (namely, the NZIFF), one only need to look at the list of recent French films that never made it to our screens, crawling their way onto DVD several years later if we're lucky. Among those: previous films by Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais, two masters represented aptly here with
Private Fears in Public Places and
A Comedy of Power respectively. Their latest works, along with the sleek and taut thriller
The Page Turner, headline a programme balanced elsewhere with lighter fare: comedy (
Hey Good Looking!), romance (
Twice upon a time), and more comedy (
The Story of My Life). Punctuating proceedings are two harder-edged offerings from Xavier Beauvois (
The Young Lieutenant) and Lucas Belvaux (
The Right of the Weakest). The festival makes its way to Rialto screens in Auckland (Feb 28-March 6) and Wellington (March 2-6) later this month. Full details by way of the festival's official website,
frenchfilmfestival.co.nz.
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