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…”
Which books and films are you planning to teach in LLCER anglais next year? This year for Terminale, we published six Reading Guides. There are three works left on the list. We are planning to publish a guide on one of them in the autumn, which would you prefer? This year we published guides on … Continue reading “Vote for Your Next Reading Guide!”
We’ve been promising you a resource on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic story about an orphan girl who discovers a hidden garden and decides it will help cure her sickly cousin. It’s perfect for coming-of-age stories in LLCER, but we also wanted younger students to be able to enjoy it, so we’ve provided three different resources … Continue reading “The Secret Garden”
Dickens’ classic, David Copperfield, is given new life in this movie by Armando Ianucci. Beyond the slightly reinvented plot itself, we are given to experience a new way of telling stories, as boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred if not crossed. What’s more, this brand-new funny version features colour-blind casting and leads us to … Continue reading “David Copperfield”
The Personal History of David Copperfield is far from the first adaptation of Charles Dickens’ semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. But Armando Iannucci has given the story a very new feel, while keeping Dickens’ humour and playing with that idea of autobiography and the art of inventing oneself through the act of writing. Iannucci is known for … Continue reading “David Copperfield: Dickens for the 21st Century”
Her books were once considered so scandalous that they were banned in Ireland, but at age 90, The Country Girls author Edna O’Brien received the honour of being declared a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot on 7 March. O’Brien has been prolific since the first of … Continue reading “Irish Author Edna O’Brien Honoured”
The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi, one of the novels proposed as an oeuvre intégrale on the LLCER Terminale curriculum, deals with many themes that are relevant to students today: the search for identity, race, and racism and integration. These exercises, based on the first four chapters of the novel, will prepare students for … Continue reading “Studying “The Buddha of Suburbia” in LLCER”