Louis Malle Film Festival

Louis Malle Film Festival Featuring French movies by director Louis Malle:

Louis Malle has worked in both French cinema and Hollywood. He is sometimes associated with the nouvelle vague (new wave), though his work does not directly fit in or correspond to the theories. He did exemplify many of the characteristics of the movement, including using natural light and shooting on location. In 1968 Louis Malle made a documentary film about India which was broadcast as a seven-part TV series called L’Inde Phantome (Phantom India) on the BBC.

Film Screenings:

• The Lovers: 19 February, 7.00 p.m.
The Lovers is French-filmmaker Louis Malle’s second venture as director, and a sterling example of classic cinema. A mix of Classic and French New Wave cinema, it created an international furore for its sexual content, yet was responsible for redefining obscenity in terms of its depiction in cinema. An affluent, restless French woman must choose between her family and her lover.

• Zazie in the Metro: 20 February, 7.00 p.m.
Provincial 12 year-old Zazie comes to stay with her uncle Gabriel for two days, while her mother spends sometime with her lover. However, Zazie escapes her uncle’s custody and sets out to explore Paris on her own.

• The Fire Within: 21 February, 7.00 p.m.
Louis Malle makes a spellbinding account of the last 48 hours in the life of an alcoholic playboy, heading relentlessly towards suicide. The ghosts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe are involved in this tale of dissolution and suicide, told without self-pity or spurious sociology. The film won the Italian Film Critics’ Award for Best Film and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1963.

• Murmur of the Heart: 22 February, 7.00 p.m.
This well-known movie combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, the film received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay in 1972 and was in official selection at the 1971 Festival de Cannes.

• Goodbye Children 23 February, 7.00 p.m.
Goodbye Children is Louis Malle’s semiautobiographical story of friendship and betrayal during World War II. In a Catholic boarding school, Julien befriends new student Jean. Jean is one of three Jewish students that the headmaster and teachers have secretly hidden, to protect them from the Gestapo. As the bond grows between the two boys, the war escalates, and Jean’s life-saving secret is unwittingly revealed.