With a rich variety of animated shorts, local documentaries, and dramatic features, the 29th annual New Orleans French Film Festival has something for everyone. Want to watch a documentary about zydeco music? What about an animated Holocaust movie from an Oscar winner? If surreal sci-fi is more your speed, they’ve got that too. How about a classic (or two) by the all-around creative genius Jean Cocteau? This feast for the Franco-cinephile is laden and waiting. Allons-y?
NARRATIVE FEATURES
Beauty and the Beast
La Belle et la Bête
It’s a tale as old as time… the daughter of a merchant gives up her freedom so her father can live, only to be condemned to spend the rest of her days trapped in the castle of a hideous beast. Jean Cocteau’s 1946 reimagining is sultry and ravishing. Jean Marais is our Beast, covered head-to-toe in practical fur, topped with animatronic cat-like ears. His emotions are in his movements and his swooning self-pity is more Romeo than monster. As Belle, Josette Day’s intoxicating allure sends a hypnotic fervor through every frame. The film works to match Day’s grand expressions with touches of pure magic—candelabras held by extended human hands flare up by themselves, smoke billows from the fingers of the Beast after he has killed, and mirrors shimmer and smash apart when emotions run high. Cocteau considered himself first and foremost a poet, and his lyrical look at this romance doesn’t just highlight the emotional forces of the heart; it twists the physical world to express the euphoria of the body. Marais was Cocteau’s muse and lover, and he uses every trick of the camera to express his love for this Beast. With its lush cinematography, crooning musical chorus, and painterly, kaleidoscopic sets, La Belle et la Bête serves as a love letter to our primal desires. —Zain Hashmat
Nino
Nino, Pauline Loquès’ feature-length directorial debut, is clearly indebted to Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda’s French New Wave masterpiece about a woman awaiting her cancer diagnosis told in real time. Nino picks up where Cléo left off. Théodore Pellerin won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for his performance as Nino Clavel, who we meet as he receives a surprise cancer diagnosis the weekend of his 29th birthday. He locks himself out of his apartment and spends the next three days confronting life and death. He reckons with his dead father’s passing while spending a quiet birthday evening with his mother. His ex is moving to Montreal. His friends throw him a surprise party where he lets loose and waxes philosophic. Mathieu Amalric makes a cameo as a man yearning for his dead wife. Nino runs into an old classmate with a child and builds a rapport over the course of a day. He even produces a sperm sample in the most romantic baby monitor phone sex you will ever see, featuring the erotica of Anaïs Nin. Wearing his anxiety and apprehension on his face, Pellerin carries a film that portrays a close-to-universal experience with optimism. —Carlos A. Molina
Orpheus
Orphée
As New Orleanians, we are very familiar with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus sets his interpretation of the myth in 1950s France, with poets, greasers, beatniks, and bohemians modernizing the myth. Cocteau himself was a dreamer, poet, playwright, and filmmaker who used surrealism to his creative advantage. The world of dreams and the afterlife was his sandbox, and his exploration is extensive and rife with experimentation with different special effects. The mirror portals presage such CGI revolutionaries as Terminator 2 and The Matrix, using mercury and trick photography to achieve an amazingly trippy effect, even more impressive when considering it was made over 75 years ago. The performances of Jean Marais (Orpheus) and María Casares (Death) toe the line perfectly between aloof and cunning. It’s an excellent adaptation and update of the classic myth, and its fairy tale quality juxtaposes well with Rolls-Royces and ‘50s aesthetic. Cocteau’s use of all the effects at his disposal continues to surprise and visually impress even a modern audience. —Carlos A. Molina
The Piano Accident
L’accident de piano
Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as viral video sensation Megajugs in her third collaboration with director Quentin Dupieux, whose film Daaaaaalí! played at last year’s French Film Festival. Dupieux continues to excel at surrealist genre blending in The Piano Accident, a satire of both celebrity and consumerism, as well as our addiction to fame and the internet. Exarchopoulos downplays her beauty for a role that puts her in braces, a cast, and a boyish haircut to embody an entitled and petulant social media star who thinks she can throw money at anything. Her character, who is immune to physical pain, has escaped to an isolated chalet in the mountains after some sort of mysterious mishap involving one of her videos, and then a journalist attempts to blackmail her. The film strategically withholds information to keep the viewer intrigued and guessing, so the less said, the better. It snowballs into wanton acts of desperation as she and her manager Patrick, played by the French comedian Jérôme Commandeur, attempt to remedy the situation. It all comes together as a scathing critique of what we’re willing to do for our 15 minutes of fame, and what we’re doing to ourselves when we consume said content. —Carlos A. Molina
The Stranger
L’Étranger
Looks can be deceiving in François Ozon’s The Stranger. Adapted from Albert Camus’ celebrated novella about a man who kills without real reason, Ozon’s 2025 reinterpretation presents a beautiful boy whose shining facade hides a heart of stone. We meet Benjamin Voisin’s Meursault just after he learns of his mother’s death. His response—that of pure indifference—signals something off about the young man. Bathed in the Algerian sun, statuesque and wide-eyed, Meursault attracts others like moths to a flame. Within a day of his mother’s burial, he begins an affair with his impossibly forgiving ex-coworker, Marie, and strikes up a friendship with his hot-blooded neighbor, Raymond. After being pulled in a little too close to Raymond’s abusive, violent orbit, Meursault commits murder, a crime that causes his community to question his character. Shot in milky black-and-white and accompanied by a tense, droning score, Ozon immerses us in Meursault’s uncaring world with a coolness that can be at once riveting and a little too removed. Camus’ novel functioned as an inquiry into France’s colonial indifference, and while Ozon attempts to foreground the racism and injustice faced by Algerians, he struggles to thread its varying interests. Its moments of loose surrealism butt up against the moral melodrama driving the film’s last half. Much like Meursault, The Stranger meanders and observes, but when it tries to confront the ethical dilemmas at the center of its story, its icy remove fails to give way to a sense of real emotion at its core. —Zain Hashmat
DOCUMENTARY FEATURES
Dahomey
When something is stolen, can what was taken be truly returned? This is the central question of Dahomey, Mati Diop’s 2024 docu-fiction hybrid chronicling the repatriation of 26 historical objects and their journey from France back to their homeland of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin. There’s a tender touch and sense of fantasy to Dahomey’s filmmaking. Diop doesn’t just take us through the shipping, set up, and exhibition of these artworks and artifacts; she breathes life into the process and attempts to take a look at every perspective of this generational moment. “Everything is so strange. Far removed from the country I saw in my dreams,” states the statue of King Ghezo, voiced by Makenzy Orcel in an electronic, humming register that feels both perfectly ancient and futuristic. And the future of Benin is what’s being considered with these artifacts. Halfway through the film, Diop pulls us into a debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi, their passionate outlooks on the objects’ historical return ranging from seeing them as treasures finally coming home to being nothing more than a political move from the French as a means to improve their waning standing in Africa. Diop’s roving filmmaking swings us back and forth from the students to the statues with a sharp sense of dialectic and a probing curiosity. It’s clear that this homecoming is a step towards patching up generations of damage, but it leaves us with no doubt that there’s still much work to be done. —Zain Hashmat
ANIMATED FEATURES
The Most Precious of Cargoes
La plus précieuse des marchandises
Oscar winner Michel Hazanavicius’s The Most Precious of Cargoes, an adaptation of a novel of the same name, uses gorgeous animation to tell a harrowing modern fairy tale about a couple in the woods who finds a baby thrown from an Auschwitz-bound train. It premiered and competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, a rare but deserved feat for an animated feature. The use of light and the depiction of nature achieve an almost whimsical effect, giving a hint of magical realism to this woodland tale in which any frame would make a stunning standalone painting. The falling snow, the animals, the cooing baby, the family by the hearth, are all just beautiful. It also uses the power of animation to depict the atrocities and suffering in the death camps, with nightmarish imagery that simultaneously accentuates and softens the true nature of what happened, while following the baby’s father’s journey. These parallel stories lead us to a heartbreaking end, with a coda of narration that admonishes deniers while laying out a message of hope and love—fitting for our modern times. —Carlos A. Molina
NARRATIVE SHORTS
Two People Exchanging Saliva
Deux Personnes échangeant de la Salive
There’s a good chance by the time you’re reading this or seeing it at the French Film Festival, Two People Exchanging Saliva will have won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. It’s nominated and has already won at numerous other festivals after debuting at the Telluride Film Festival in 2024. In a dystopian future that doesn’t look entirely different from our own, kissing is illegal and replaced by slaps to the face. The rich have deep cheek bruises. Halitosis gains you access to your workplace like a demented COVID fever scan. Toothpaste and toothbrushes are contraband, and surreptitiously brushing your teeth suggests drug users tying one off in a McDonald’s bathroom. Cardboard coffins are tossed in a pit over the muffled protestations coming from within. There’s social commentary through symbolism, from the character names (Malaise, Chagrin), to the black-and-white cinematography, to the checkered designer brand dresses evoking a QR code from hell. If that’s not enough for you, there’s also forbidden love and a Showgirls-esque storyline where the new kid on the block is replacing the old head. If this review leaves you curious, the short will only heighten the feeling. —Carlos A. Molina
ANIMATED SHORTS
Chasse Galerite
In one of Brian Hawkins’ tall tale interpretations about the isolated French-speaking Missouri settlers of the 1700s, the crafty title character hunts, manifests his identity, and finds love in a story that echoes the true history surrounding its events. Settling the area after the expedition of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, the French came to find home and community alongside the Indigenous peoples of modern-day Missouri. Potentially based on a real person by the name of Michel Occoult, this rich retelling may be the origin story of the Métis, officially recognized children of marriages between Missouri French Creole settlers and Indigenous peoples. In a stunning historical twist revealed at the close of the film, the audience is left to marvel at the parallels the story has to history, and wonder how tall the tale really is. With surreal imagery illustrated in watercolor and stop-motion paper puppetry, Chasse Galerite is a lesson in how things that occur in time and nature have a tendency to come back around. —Terra Durio
Irish Washerwoman
La Vieille femme qui lave
In Brian Hawkins’ The Irish Washerwoman, the musical tradition of the Missouri French Creole is portrayed in fluid watercolor. As the audience watches an old woman do her laundry, entrancing fiddle tunes offer them a glimpse into the cultural soundscape of the old days. Preserved in recordings made with the help of the Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts, the instrumental stylings of The Irish Washerwoman are a lovely accompaniment to the oral interpretations of Hawkins’ short film catalog. —Terra Durio
The Neighbors
Les Vouèsins
A hauntingly beautiful animated short film by Brian Hawkins, The Neighbors is adapted from a popular oral folktale of the isolated French-speaking Creole community of Old Mines, Missouri. As the restless trickster Petit Jean torments his formidable neighbor Grand Guiable, enough never proves to be enough. It was transcribed phonetically in the 1930s at the peak of its popularity, as told by master storyteller (conteur) Frank “Boy” Bourisaw. Hawkins narrates the film as one person with many voices, depicting the tale in rich watercolor and animated stop-motion paper puppetry. A curious rumination on trust and community, the tale’s dark undertones are accentuated by Nicolas Snyder’s vividly ominous soundtrack (thoughtfully informed by the Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts). In this rich interpretation, Hawkins’ deft distillation captures the essence of imaginative storytelling in one of the most unique animated films I have ever seen. —Terra Durio
Top image: Chasse Galerite
The 29th New Orleans French Film Festival runs from March 19 through March 24 at the Prytania Theatre Uptown and venues across the city. For more info, check out neworleansfilmsociety.org/french-film-festival.
