The American French Film Festival Strengthens the Bond Between Hollywood and Le Cinema Francais

Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to just pick up the phone and ask. At least, that’s true if you’re legendary Hollywood player and two-time former Directors Guild of America president Taylor Hackford.

“I called Ted Sarandos,” recalls Hackford, who, for the purpose of that phone call, was wearing yet another hat: board member of the Franco-American Cultural Fund (FACF), which produces the American French Film Festival (TAFFF). “And I just said, ‘Ted, I’m going to propose to you that we premiere Emilia Pérez at the American French Film Festival. That’ll be our opening-night film.’”

It wasn’t a small ask, seeing as TAFFF, the only American festival dedicated to French films and series, takes place at the DGA on Sunset Boulevard — while Netflix has its own iconic location for a Hollywood premiere, the historic and newly renovated Egyptian Theatre. But Hackford had more to offer the Netflix boss than just a warm bienvenue for the streamer’s buzzy Festival de Cannes purchase, directed by Jacques Audiard.

“‘It’s great, because [FACF and TAFFF stakeholders are] members of the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild and the MPA — all Oscar voters. This is to me a better way to frame this great film in its Hollywood premiere. Then take it to the Egyptian,’” Hackford told Sarandos. “‘You’re going to make your own decision, but this, I think, will give it a big cross-cultural [push].’”

Happily, Sarandos said yes (“I owe him a great debt,” Hackford says). Then last month France chose Emilia Pérez as its best international feature Oscar submission. And on Tuesday during a red-carpet opening-night screening presented in association with Netflix, TAFFF showed an Audiard film for the first time.

Before the curtains rose, Audiard was honored with the festival’s inaugural FACF Achievement Award, presented by the CEO of the Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music (SACEM) and FACF president Cécile Rap-Veber and FACF board member Michael Mann, who called Emilia Pérez a “contemporary masterpiece.”

In a heartfelt acceptance speech, Audiard quoted renowned British child psychologist Donald Winnicott. “‘It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found,’” Audiard said. “If I quote Winnicott tonight it’s because I think that if you, my dear Michael, and I have anything in common, it’s this: the desire and the pleasure of hiding in our films, this pleasure of hiding, but with this terror of never being found, of being forever sentenced to the darkness of the hidden place. This award is the proof that you found me, and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart.”

Following the screening, Hackford moderated a Q&A with Audiard, cast members Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, costume designer and artistic director Virginie Montel, and composers and songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille, who capped off the evening with a surprise performance of the song “Mi Camino,” sung in the film by Gomez.

Emilia Pérez defies description. A musical crime drama written directed by French auteur Audiard, shot almost entirely in Paris, set almost entirely in Mexico against a backdrop of narco-culture, with dialogue and musical numbers in Mexican Spanish, the film couldn’t be a better fit for TAFFF, whose raison d’être is cross-cultural exchange.

“I’m very touched and flattered that my film is opening the festival,” Audiard says, “and I’ve always thought — and I really mean always — that films are vectors of communication between cinematographies, between bodies of film. Cinema informs about something. It identifies something. And so if you look at the history of cinema, in the 1950s, American cinema influenced European and French cinema, and in the 1970s, European, French, also Asian cinema, influenced American cinema. I really think it’s this perpetual exchange that is a great source of vitality.”

Opening with Emilia Pérez was also a shrewd way to reintroduce TAFFF, running through Nov. 3 and now in its 28^th edition, to the industry and to Los Angeles moviegoers. This year is something of a fresh start for the fest, whose parent organization, the FACF, is a partnership among the DGA, the WGA West, SACEM and the Motion Picture Association (MPA). Its goal is to promote French cinema in the US and encourage connections between the French and American entertainment industries.    

In 2019, the festival, then known as City of Lights, City of Angels (COLCOA), moved from spring to fall. Its new place on the calendar, at the start of award season, made it relevant to the industry in a way it hadn’t been before.

Prior to its move, the fest was where LA audiences first glimpsed such French talent as Marion Cotillard, in 2006’s La Vie en Rose, eight months before she won the Oscar for Best Actress, and Omar Sy, in 2015’s Samba — but it didn’t offer the same timely exposure to industry decisionmakers. Now TAFFF is “where award season begins for French cinema in Hollywood,” Mann said during a press conference announcing this year’s program. Thanks to its fall berth, he explained, the festival has been able to screen some awards contenders for the first time after their premieres at the Berlinale, Cannes or the Venice International Film Festival — like with Ladj Ly’s Lés Miserables, which had its US premiere at TAFFF in 2019 and went on to receive a best international feature Oscar nomination and to win a César for best film.

But then came 2020, when the pandemic forced the festival to go on hiatus. In 2022 it rebranded as TAFFF, only to stop down again in 2023 because of the writers and actors strikes.

“As a producer, I totally understand why we had to do it, but as a programmer, it was very frustrating because the program was ready,” says the fest’s executive producer and programmer François Truffart. (Indeed, the 2023 program was set to include Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, which went on to receive five Oscar nominations and one win, for best original screenplay.)

“But it’s interesting to see how people didn’t forget us,” Truffart says. “They were waiting for the festival to be back, so it’s very encouraging.”

The TAFFF program is a testament to that enthusiasm. Forty-five of the fest’s 60 films and series are international, North American and US premieres. Sixteen of the films are Hollywood premieres fresh from their showings in Berlin, Cannes and Venice. And eighteen films and series are showing at TAFFF before their releases in France.

Awards are one reason for the fest’s appeal. Of the fest’s 60 films and TV series — which include 32 feature films and documentaries, 14 series and TV movies, and 14 shorts — 59 of the 60 are in competition for the TAFFF Awards, which are handed out in Paris a week after the festival.

“They are becoming important in France,” Truffart says. “The interest from professionals for our awards is the fact that we have American juries and an audience which is majority from the film industry here. So the awards are very important now, because this is really the opinion of Hollywood about French cinema and this is the only moment for that.”

Additionally, this year will see the presentation of the inaugural TAFFF Impact Award. Celebrating an American industry professional who has championed French cinema and series in the US, the award will go to Kino Lorber Media Group chairman and CEO Richard Lorber.

“I think it’s really fascinating the way Lorber’s company has moved, and the way he was able to adapt the company to the market, to create new ways for films to enter the digital world,” Truffart says. “And his choices are always very exciting. … He’s very open-minded, and he knows that the audience is very much more eclectic than people may think.”

But TAFFF offers more than statuettes. Professional programs are part of the week’s events as well, including workshops led by high-profile DGA and WGAW members.

Hackford took an active role in organizing this year’s DGA workshop, where a French delegation will meet with directors Lesli Linka Glatter and Steven Zaillian to discuss “their experience in conceiving and molding a directorial vision for (an) entire series, which is somewhat new,” Hackford says — and something Zaillian did with Ripley and Glatter did with the upcoming Zero Day, both Netflix series. “Then the delegation — because there’s going to be several directors of French streaming series — they’ll start batting ideas back and forth about how they do it, how we do it, what ideas we can exchange. And I think that’s part of the joy of what this film festival is really all about, is that kind of filmmaker-to filmmaker-exchange. It’s not for a general public to sit out there and watch. It’s for a workshop of real members from both sides, real filmmakers [from France] and America.”

Similarly, WGAW and FACF board member Howard Rodman will join producer Ted Hope in presenting a three-session workshop about adapting literary works for the screen — a trend that shows no sign of fading.

Adaptations feature heavily at this year’s TAFFF. Audiard based Emilia Pérez on a character from Boris Razon’s novel Écoute. Then there’s Jessica Palud’s Being Maria, adapted from Vanessa Schneider’s 2018 memoir My Cousin Maria Schneider; writer-director Anne Fontaine’s Boléro, which draws on Marcel Marnat’s 1986 biography of composer Maurice Ravel; and from co-creators Benjamin Charbit and Noé Debré, the TV series Zorro, whose titular character was created by American pulp writer Johnston McCulley more than 100 years ago. And there’s the festival’s closing-night film, the French box office smash The Count of Monte Cristo from writers-directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière and based on the classic novel by Alexandre Dumas.

The festival opens other important doors for filmmakers as well. “We see the festival not only as a showcase that happens inside the cinemas at the DGA, but also as an opportunity for real connections and exchanges between that big visiting French delegation and the different aspects of the creative and business community,” says Stan McCoy, FACF board member and president and managing director of the MPA for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “The visiting delegation of French filmmakers will often have sit-down meetings with different people in the Los Angeles creative community. That often includes visiting one of the MPA member studios.”

TAFFF parent organization FACF is playing the long game too, cultivating future generations of filmmakers and audiences through an educational program that’s been running for 17 years. In partnership with the nonprofit European Languages and Movies in America (ELMA), TAFFF hosts five free screenings with Q&As at the DGA for a total of 3,000 schoolchildren from around the LA area.

ELMA surveys have shown that sadly “so many kids [in Los Angeles] — and we live in the world capital of cinema — have never seen a screening with a Q&A,” says TAFFF deputy director Anouchka van Riel, who took over the program in 2015 and sees it as key to the mission of cultural exchange. “It’s opening minds, and it’s young minds. It’s also at the stage where they get absolutely dazzled by some things they never would have thought about, which is the point of being exposed to different cultures and arts, and we have here the dual effect of being exposed to art in a foreign language.”

For those who can’t make it to TAFFF, the festival provides another resource: the TAFFF library. Started during the pandemic, the library offers a free search engine where anyone can look up a French title and see what it’s about, whether it’s streaming in the US, and if so, where. “You can do your own festival at home,” Truffart says.

Currently, the library lists 600 titles, and that number is sure to swell as French programming gains yet more of a foothold in the global market.

“There is more and more French content [being] produced. Why? Because now that there are all these [streaming platforms] — Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu — that form in France, they participate to produce new French content to be available on their platform,” says SACEM’s and FACF’s Cécile Rap-Veber. “It’s not only French cinema in French theaters or French movies on French broadcasters. It’s French series and French movies on global platforms that are available throughout the world.”

The best example, Rap-Veber says, is Emilia Pérez. It’s a French film that will have theatrical distribution; however, what size audience will it reach in theaters? “But it will be available on Netflix so it will be available in all the US consumer houses. And thanks to TAFFF and the highlight that [we’re doing] on Emilia Pérez, it’s an amazing window of promotion that benefits both the local services in the United States and the French cinema or audiovisual. It’s a balance of interest and now everybody benefits from that.”