This year’s IFI French Film Festival aims, as ever, to provide an eclectic look at the best of recent French cinema and this year’s programme is nothing if not wide-ranging in its content. From romantic melodramas to hip-hop animation, prison drama to slapstick comedies, intimate documentaries to drooling hordes of zombies, you’ll have plenty to choose from.

We kick off the Festival with the latest film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amélie), MICMACS, an absolutely wonderful comedy-satire surely destined to be one of the biggest French films of 2010, before closing on the 29th of November with Around a Small Mountain, the latest film from legend of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette – an appropriate way to end things in this, the 50th anniversary of the movement.

We’ll be taking a retrospective look at the work of comedy genius Jacques Tati, with a 70mm screening of PlayTime, a programme of short films, a digitally restored version of Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and a fascinating new documentary looking at his life and career. The Festival’s comedic bent continues through new films too. In addition to the aforementioned MICMACS, we have films such as The French Kissers, one of the hits of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, and the return of Emmanuel Mouret (Shall We Kiss?) to the Festival with his screwball comedy Please, Please Me!

Fans of documentary should take a look at Michel Gondry’s delicate, touching film examining the life of his aunt,
The Thorn in the Heart, and Serge Bromberg’s stunning Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno, a brilliant examination
of Clouzot’s legendary unfinished film featuring newly discovered footage. If all this wasn’t enough, we’ll have Irish premieres of work from Claude Chabrol, André Téchiné, Christophe Honoré, Jacques Audiard and Benoît
Jacquot to name but a few.

Of course, the Festival isn’t just limited to films – a night of French hip-hop will follow a screening of Round Da Way, we’ll have a panel discussion looking at the legacy of Jacques Tati, the IFI’s French Film Club, late-night horror in the form of The Horde and a quiz night in the IFI’s newly renovated bar.

Whether you indulge in one or ten days of French cinema, we hope you’ll find much to enjoy in this year’s Festival.

Niall Macpherson
IFI Festivals & Events Programmer