The French Film Festival, the yearly event dedicated to showcasing French cinema, is to take place between June 1 and June 12 in Bucharest and ten other cities, namely Cluj-Napoca, Iaşi, Timişoara, Brăila, Braşov, Constanţa, Sfântu Gheorghe, Sibiu, Suceava and Târgu Mureş

The screenings will be held both in cinemas and in an open-air format.

As part of the festival, the Young Talents – Feature competition will highlight the new names of French cinema. Five debut features to be screened at the event will compete for the Public's Choice Award, a EUR 1,000 fellowship offered by the French Institute to the director of the winning film, as well as financial support granted by TV5 Monde to the Romanian distributor who opts to take on the film. This section includes two films selected in the Semaine de la Critique program in Cannes: Vincent Le Port’s Bruno Reidal and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Les Amours d'Anaïs/ Anaïs in Love.

For the second year in a row, the Young Talents-Shorts competition will cover five productions with an outstanding festival track record. A jury of young film critics, made up of Dora Leu, Călin Boto and Andreea Chiper, will select the winner. The award is a residence at Résidence de Poche, a program offering the director the framework to develop a feature.

As always, the festival will screen the recent hits of French cinemas, among them Alain Guiraudie's Viens je t'emmène/Nobody's Hero, which premiered at this year's Berlinale, and Audrey Diwan's L'événement/ Happening, the winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

As France holds this year the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, the festival will also celebrate in its Regard vers l'Europe section the cinematic cooperation in Europe. It will screen a French-European coproduction representative for each decade starting with the 1960s.

Among the selected films are Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe/ The Big Feast and Andrzej Żuławski's Possession. The special guest of the section is Tunisian-French producer Saïd Ben Saïd, who will present in Bucharest Paul Verhoeven's Elle, the winner of the César for Best Film in 2017.

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simona@romania-insider.com