The delegation of French actors and directors from the 2016 French Film Festival gathers in front of The Byrd Theatre. (Photo by Pierre Courtois)
After 31 years and 28 festivals, the annual and much anticipated Richmond French Film Festival, the largest of its kind outside Europe, is putting up the supertitle that reads “Finis.”
But, perhaps, with something of a sequel in the offing.
The festival’s co-founders, spouses Peter Kirkpatrick, an associate professor of French at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Françoise Ravaux-Kirkpatrick, a professor of French and film studies at the University of Richmond, began the event in 1993. Both recently retired and are now emeriti.
They decided that the time had come to dissolve into a new format, they say.
In a press release sent exclusively to Richmond magazine, the founders wrote that “a window will remain open for the French Film Festival to provide special programming through a strategic partnership with the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival.”
Cooperation between the French Film Festival and the Pocahontas Reframed organization began years ago, with memorable presentations such as the 2019 screening of the French Canadian film “Hochelaga: Land of Souls,” presented by Pocahontas Reframed festival director Brad Brown (Pamunkey) and a frequent French Film Festival guest, actor George Aguilar (Apache/Yaqui). The multilayered story depicts massive rains causing a chasm to open up in the middle of a Montreal football stadium. This leads to the revelation of 750 years of history.
According to the release, at a recent dinner in Paris, Laurent Mannoni, director of the Cinémathèque Française film organization, said to Kirkpatrick and Ravaux-Kirkpatrick, “You both created something unique, downright amazing for French cinema. Your design of the Festival, special events, and your hosting of guests on stage in the Byrd and during eye-opening Master classes just simply cannot be replicated anywhere else.”
The French Film Festival, which started in the basement of VCU’s James Branch Cabell Library, grew into the largest French-language film festival outside of Europe.
(From left) French Film Festival founders and Directors Françoise Ravaux-Kirkpatrick and Peter Kirkpatrick and Assistant Director Marine Leclaire during the 2018 event (Photo courtesy French Film Festival)
In 1993, it had been only two years since the couple’s wedding in France, but they sought an unique way to engage their students through their shared passion for French culture. To them, film offered the best format.
Audience members came from around the country to attend screenings at The Byrd Theatre and symposiums and master classes on the art and science of filmmaking at the University of Richmond. Luminaries of the French film industry including actors, directors, cinematographers and writers made the pilgrimage to Richmond.
The movies shown here were often screening for the first time in the United States. Some, which otherwise couldn’t get distribution in this country, lit up the screen only in Richmond.
When the French tricolor began fluttering above The Byrd Theatre and around Carytown each year, the colorful appearance marked a change of season.
By its 25th anniversary in 2017, the festival had shown 700 films and welcomed 850 screenwriters, actors, cinematographers, composers, artists and technicians to Richmond.
The festival not only brought to town a crop of contemporary French cinema, it also screened classics, and even historic films, including tributes to the genius of film pioneer Georges Méliès and other early makers.
These works, especially those of Méliès (he made the one with the image of a projectile/rocket jammed into the eye of the Man on the Moon) with their do-it-yourself enthusiasm and blend of the stagey theatrical accompanied by rudimentary special effects, appear nearly retro-futurist, as though created today by a director attempting to make a movie that looks old. Méliès’ groundbreaking techniques inspired an homage by Martin Scorsese, the 2011 film “Hugo.”
A consistent favorite at the festival was the mini-festival within, that of short films, which began around breakfast time on Saturday mornings and eventually, due to their popularity and the number of good titles, expanded to Sunday.
The shorts not only offered a variety — comedy, drama, fantasy — but proved useful for language instruction. Seven DVDs were made available of past shorts programs.
One of the more compelling aspects of the festival involved the simultaneous translation skills of Kirkpatrick. Standing on The Byrd’s stage, usually in a black suit and tie alongside directors or actors with their varying commands of English, he made swift notes and processed their commentary and answers from audience members, conveying insight and humor. Ravaux-Kirkpatrick guided guests and shepherded volunteers with cosmopolitan grace.
At times, the festival seemed like a big movie of itself, directed by the founders. Then in 2015, due to The Byrd’s involvement with the festival, director Jean Achache made a documentary about the theater as one installment of a six-part French television series called “Cinémas Mythiques” (“Mythic Cinemas”).
The festival brought to The Byrd moments of the fantastic, such as the 2017 presentation by the Cinémathèque Française of restored “magic lantern” shows.
The 1928 movie palace probably had never seen a spectacle quite like this one. The occasion involved a more than century-old three-lensed, steampunk-esque projection device and about 125 antique glass, hand-painted prismatic slides, many of them from the 18th century. Actor-narrator Nathan Willcocks brought his rich voice and talents to the spectacular, accompanied by harpist Liénor Mancip and sound effects artist Zakaria Mahmoud.
Smoke, Death, jugglers, rats scurrying down a snoring man’s throat and Robinson Crusoe all figured into this travelogue of experience. In the cartoon-y characters and movement provided by the slides, one could see the prefiguration of Terry Gilliam’s “Monty Python” animation.
The term “once in a lifetime” gets bandied about, but in this case it proved completely apt.
The festival provided many other enduring memories. Among them is the film screening of “Marching Band,” by a frequent festival guest, César-winning director Claude Miller (1942-2012).
Miller’s documentary concerned U.S. university marching bands. Such organizations don’t really exist in France. Due to his association with the film festival, Miller focused on the bands at the University of Virginia and Virginia State University. The energy of these groups is depicted against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election. In one image from the night before that historic vote, a UVA baton twirler tosses high her silver bar, and Miller captures the flickering metal rising toward the moon.
A 2009 offering was “Musée haut, musée bas” (“Museum High, Museum Low”; in U.S. distribution it became, “A Day at the Museum”), adapted by Jean-Michel Ribes from his stage play. The satirical take on the appreciation and preservation of culture featured a huge cast of familiar French actors.
French actress and writer Josiane Balasko was featured on 2020 French Film Festival promotional posters, which remained in store windows for months after the event’s 2020 and 2021 cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Image courtesy French Film Festival)
Like museumgoers gliding through galleries, the film delivered a series of set pieces, by turns zany and surreal, comedic and profound. One theme is that of the frantic museum director, who lives in fear of nature, as vines begin growing into the museum and a great storm buffets the institution. It all ends with a re-creation of Théodore Géricault’s 1818-19 painting “The Raft of the Medusa” as an assortment of museum staffers and stranded visitors struggle to bring what’s left of the collection — and human creative endeavor — to safety.
One was left with the impression that nothing lasts forever, but we should try to maintain art that encompasses the varieties of experience while we can — because what else is there?
A 2018 offering was the multi-César-winning “Au revoir là-haut” (“See You up There”). Two veterans of the trenches of World War I, one who suffered horrible physical damage, alter their lives and choose to design and sell but not build or install war memorials. This odious grift plays upon their own vulnerable and grieving population.
In early 2020, posters for the festival began appearing in the windows of local coffee houses and shops featuring the wistful face of a frequent visitor, actor-writer-producer-director Josiane Balasko. Her expression became more appropriate as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world like a blaze inexorably eating up an old nitrate-based film reel.
The 2022 French Film Festival featured a screening of “L’Incroyable Historic du Facteur Cheval,” a tale based on the true story of a man who throws himself into building an incredible palace with his own hands. (Image courtesy French Film Festival)
Fare for the 2022 festival — which would end up being the final event — included “L’Incroyable Histoire du Facteur Cheval,” director Nils Tavernier’s lovely, poignant tale based on a true story about shy, eccentric rural French mail carrier Joseph Ferdinand Cheval, who meets a woman who gets who he is, though their lives are not idyllic.
Through circumstances, or to triumph over them, Cheval begins building an elaborate structure both to hold and display their dreams, an “Ideal Palace.” He devotes 33 years of his life to creating a near-miraculous work of art, which still stands. People cried at the end of the film screening.
This was but one of several films in the joyous post-pandemic return of the festival about dreams and reality and their convergence or separation.
“Très Haut” concerned well-known French actor David Proux, who had become deluded into thinking he was the exiled Superman — at least for the point of this faux documentary; “Tralala” told the story of a down and out Parisian singer-songwriter who is enchanted by a woman who gives him a few words of advice, then disappears, and he’s compelled to pursue her; and a powerful animated film, “La Traversée” (“The Crossing”), followed refugee siblings seeking a new home.
These metaphorical considerations of dreams meeting reality, of delusion becoming actual life, and the plight of the dispossessed, stand out in sharp relief today.
The films were in French, but the stories were universal.
