It’s that time of year: the cream of Hollywood, and independent U.S. cinema will be crowding the boardwalk at Deauville for the American Film Festival from 2 to 11 September. There are 13 films in the main competition, seven of them first films and a couple by joint directors. Hollywood is famously obsessed with LA … Continue reading “Deauville with an American Accent: Film Festival 2022”
The 33rd edition of the Dinard British Film Festival will take place in Brittany from 28 September to 2 October. The films in competition haven’t been announced yet, but you can get ready to sign up your classes to see some of the best British films from the last year at special schools showings. As … Continue reading “Films for Classes in Dinard!”
A new addition to the programme limitatif LLCER anglais Terminale is Brooklyn by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (2009). It’s a very approachable novel covering themes of exile, homesickness, first love and personal choice. We’re preparing a Reading Guide for the novel, coming out just after the Toussaint holidays. Brooklyn is set in 1950s Ireland and … Continue reading “New Reading Guide: Brooklyn”
The 2022 Oscar ceremony was memorable… But what about the winning films? Several of our favourite films of the last year came away with awards. And CODA beat off some favourites to take Best Picture. New Zealand director Jane Campion was the first woman to be nominated twice for Best Director, and this time she … Continue reading “And the Oscar Winners Are…”
Ever since Jane Campion burst onto the world stage with an Oscar for The Piano, she has shown a deft capacity to depict buttoned up, repressed emotions. The Power of the Dog, nominated for 12 Oscars, is no exception. The Netflix new-generation Western stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plomens as Montana ranching brothers Phil and … Continue reading “The Power of the Dog”
As promised, our latest Reading Guide for Terminale LLCER, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi Is at the printers and will be available at the beginning of March. Kureishi was already an established screenwriter and playwright when he published the novel in 1990. In the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get … Continue reading “New Reading Guide: The Buddha of Suburbia”
If Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age film Licorice Pizza feels much more real than many films about teenagers, there’s a good reason: it was a project Anderson dreamed up in lockdown. When it was still impossible to do a COVID-compliant shoot, he roped in his kids’ friends and his friends’ kids to make a film about … Continue reading “It’s Not Easy Being a Teen”
Colin in Black and White is a new Netflix mini-series directed by Ava Duvernay. It’s ostensibly the story of Kaepernick’s high- school years, before he became an NFL Star and started his “take a knee” protests. In fact it’s a sort of manifesto with the older Kaepernick using his younger self to illustrate how he … Continue reading “Colin Kaepernick: Birth of an Activist”
The This is England short-film festival in Rouen has a specific programme of short films for collège classes covering topics from food poverty to sharing, coming-of-age to fossil hunting. If you sign up for a collège showing, your students will see eight films ranging in length from 1m30 to 19 minutes. There’s one animation, one … Continue reading “Short Films with your Collège Students”
Thank you to all of you who answered our poll about which of the oeuvres intégrales for Terminale LLCER you would like a Reading Guide for first. And the winner is… The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) by Hanif Kureishi, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about a boy with an English mother and Pakistani father growing up … Continue reading “The Big Reveal: Our Next Reading Guide Will Be…”
