Please see our Thursday and Saturday programs, too!

A Film Festival and Conference

April 11-13, 2019

This three-day film festival explores changing representations of blackness in French cinema through a cross-disciplinary approach. The festival will include screenings of different kinds of films from different periods and regions: documentaries, features, and shorts — many of them rarely available in the U.S. Themes will include the legacy of colonial representations of black French people, housing projects, new intimacies across the racial line, and African-Americans in France. Roundtables will bring together directors, actors, and scholars from France and the U.S.

This three-day event, which includes film screenings as well as conference panels, is co-organized by Isabelle Boni-Claverie (French film director, screenwriter, visiting professor at NYU in the Spring 2019) and Frédéric Viguier (Institute of French Studies, GSAS).

Film screenings are free of charge and open to the public. Seating is first-come, first-served.

Presented by Institute of French Studies and Cinema Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture, the Institute of African American Affairs, the Center for French Language and Cultures.

With the support of NYU’s Office of the Provost – Global Research Initiatives, NYU Center for the Humanities, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, La Cinémathèque Afrique – Institut Français.

Partners : AfroPunk and Ubikwist

FILMING RACE AND GENDER IN THE HOUSING PROJECTS – April 12, 2019

They were the grand-children of the former colonized; their parents were immigrants; they were still called the second generation even though they were born in France. Conditionally French, relegated far from the city centers in the ghettos of the Republic, they invented a new urban identity, fed by rap music and American cultural references.

The first film about the housing projects was directed by Mathieu Kassovitz in 1991. Although he was a white middle-class film-maker, who didn’t live in the projects, his movie La Haine became a cult movie and founded a movie genre that dictated representations of the black experience in France. Two decades later, rap artist Abd Al Malik followed the rules of the genre to subvert it. As for film-maker Alice Diop, she chose to distance herself from the genre in her César-awarded Vers la Tendresse, and deconstruct stereotypes about the boys of the housing projects, their sexuality and their skills.

Screening 1 – 12:00-2:00 PM

Location: Michelson Theater, Department of Cinema Studies. 721 Broadway 6th Floor. New York, NY 10003

Les Misérables, short film by Ladj Ly, 2017 (15 min.)

La Haine (Hate), feature film by Mathieu Kassovitz, 1991 (98 min.)

Screening 2 – 3:00-5:30 PM

Location: Michelson Theater, Department of Cinema Studies. 721 Broadway 6th Floor. New York, NY 10003

May Allah Bless France, feature film by Abd Al Malik, 2014 (95 min.)

Screening 3 and panel discussion – 6:00-9:30 PM

Location: NYU Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8^th Street. New York, NY 10003.

La Mort de Danton (Danton’s Death), documentary film by Alice Diop, 2011 (40 min.)

Vers la tendresse (Towards Tenderness), documentary film by Alice Diop, 2016 (64 min.)

Q&A with Alice Diop.

Panel: Between American tropism, rap influences and fascination for gangster films, how does one propose representations of young black people that escape stereotypes? Two to three decades after the pioneer Euzhan Palcy, what is the situation of the new generation of black directors?

Moderated by Ed Guerrero (NYU). With Alice Diop (film-director), and Trica Keaton (Dartmouth).

Cécile Bishop is Assistant Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. She works on postcolonial francophone literatures and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and the representation of race in French culture. Her first book, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny, was published by Legenda in 2014.

Rich Blint is a scholar, writer and curator. He is Assistant Professor of Literature, and Director of the Ethnicity and Race concentration at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School. His upcoming books include A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture and A Queer Spirit: Incidents in the Life of the Americas.

Isabelle Boni-Claverie is a writer, film and television screenwriter, and director. She wrote and directed the documentary Too Black to Be French?, and the book with the same title, which was published in 2017.

Sandrine Collard is a scholar and art curator. She is Assistant Professor of African Art History at Rutgers University. She works on post-colonialism in the arts, portraiture, vernacular photograph, the representation of gender and domesticity, and the globalization of the contemporary art scene. Her current book project examines the history of photography in the colonial Congo (1885-1960). 

Ed Guerrero is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, and Africana Studies, at New York University. His books, including Framing Blackness, and Do the Right Thing, explore black cinema’s cultural, political and aesthetic history, as well as its critical discourse.

Trica Keaton is Associate Professor of Critical Race and African Diaspora Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research interests and courses focus on constructs and lived experiences of race, racialization, racism and their intersections as well as identity politics in France, continental Europe, and the U.S. Her work also explores the various ways that racialized people respond to those lived realities, particularly in everyday life. Her book publications include Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion; Black Europe and the African Diaspora; and Black France-France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (co-edited).

Lydie Moudileno is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching explore postcolonial literatures and arts from France and the Global South, with a focus on Africa and the Caribbean.She is the author of several books including L’écrivain antillais au miroir de sa littérature, Parades postcoloniales, and Mythologies postcoloniales: Décoloniser le quotidien.

Frédéric Viguier is a sociologist. He is Clinical Associate Professor at New York University’s Institute of French Studies. His work focuses on inequalities in contemporary France and the francophone world, how they are perceived and represented, whether they are corrected though social policies and education. He is currently working on a book that examines the paradoxical persistence of French education in Morocco since Moroccan independence.