This year's edition of the French Film Festival takes place between May 8 and May 19, bringing 146 screenings set to 13 cities across the country.

The festival takes place in Bucharest (May 8 - 16), Cluj (May 9 - 12), Timişoara (May 9 - 13), Iaşi (May 11 - 14), Arad (May 9 - 11), Braşov (May 9 - 11), Brăila (May 10 - 12), Buzău (May 9 - 10), Constanţa (May 16 - 19), Piteşti (May 16 - 19), Sfântu Gheorghe (May 16 - 19), Sinaia (May 16 - 19) and Suceava (May 10 - 11).

The festival is included this year in the Romania-France cultural season and its theme will be “Paris, toujours...”. As such, the public will get to see a series of films where France’s capital is a landmark.

A total of 23 films will be screened in the festival’s four sections: Young Directors’ Competition, Panorama of French Films of the Year, Cahiers du Cinema Week, and Retrospective.

The competition section gathers six directors who have made one or two feature films, and has a distribution financing award offered by TV5 Monde. Two of the directors will also come to Romania. They are Marie Monge, director of Joueurs, a film that mines the underground life of the Paris of the gamblers, and Matthieu Baryere, director of L'Epoque, which looks at contemporary Paris at night. Monge will be present at the festival’s events in Timişoara and Bucharest, while Baryere in Bucharest and Iaşi.

The Panorama section covers eight films of established directors, such as Stephane Brize, Christophe Honore, Agnes Jaoui or Gilles Lellouche. The film Un peuple et son roi (One nation, one king) will open the festival on May 8, in Bucharest, while Le Grand Bain (Sink or swim) by Gilles Lellouche will close the festival, in Bucharest and in Timişoara.

The Cahiers du Cinema Week will feature Romanian figures such as Genica Athanasiou, Aurora Cornu or Elvire Popesco, who inspired French directors, in a selection of films made by critic Joachim Lepastier. At the same time, the Bucharest screening of the silent film Maldone will be a cine-concert of Karpov not Kasparov, who will perform live their own adaptation of the original soundtrack.

The Retrospective section is dedicated to Claire Simon, who will also meet the public in Cluj, on May 11, and in Bucharest, between May 12 and May 14.

All films are screened in French, with Romanian subtitles. The program is available here.

In Bucharest, tickets can be purchased at eventbook.ro, from the Elvire Popesco cinema, and the Kyralina and Humanitas bookstores.

(Photo: Cristian Nistor/ Cinema Elvire Popesco Facebook Page)

editor@romania-insider.com