French Film Festival | From Paris to the Pyrenees

Across November and December, the French Film Festival brings an exciting selection of francophone cinema to UK venues for the 33rd time, and this year, for the first time, to Exeter Phoenix, a real treat for Devon audiences. The following is a taster of the five films screened last weekend, with the first three set to return to Studio 74 soon. Now in its 10th year, Studio 74 continues to stand out in Devon as a unique destination for brave, searching cinema worth seeking out.

A Private Life

Swirling snowfall, the pumping bass of Psycho Killer, blood red letters. A Private Life has a punchy opening and keeps a steady momentum.

Jodie Foster shows off her fluency in French, playing a psychiatrist who begins to unravel when learning of a patient’s recent death. Director Rebecca Zlotowski drip-feeds us both backstory and plot, layering tangled personal relationships on top of the central conceit. As such, the audience is placed in the therapist’s chair as we try to figure out just how justified Foster’s character, Lilian, is in her increasingly outlandish theories and reckless actions. 

The symbolism of hands is persistent throughout – alluding to the psychiatrist’s struggle to hold onto control, and her pursuit of authentic connection. Lilian’s world is highly specific and curated; a sea of blues and greens that exude wealth and enforced calm. It’s those who most challenge her who appear in red or reddish tones: a hypnotherapist, and the dead patient’s daughter.

Ultimately grappling with the cost of emotional repression, Zlotowski’s film manages to maintain a sense of levity by balancing the compelling chemistry between its actors with its darker themes. A Private Life filters its thriller impulses through the details of an incisively-observed character study, while keeping them accessible enough to make for good discussion on the car journey home.

Nouvelle Vague

What made Breathless so special? The 1960 Godard classic rattled audiences used to neat three-act structures, and a producer used to directors arriving with a script and working past lunchtime.

In Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Boyhood, School of Rock) lines up the who’s who of the French New Wave and plunges the viewer into the thick of a filmmaking scene electric with possibility. We open on an agitated Godard, desperate to shoot his first feature film and catch up to his contemporaries – the film which would end up being Breathless. 

Armed with a cameraman trained in active combat, and he himself with pure audacity, Godard heads into his shoot stunningly underprepared (or deliberately open to discovery, depending on who you believe). As Linklater takes us through the shoot day by day, we’re invited to question the myth of the auteur filmmaker and his divine vision. 

Remarkably, Nouvelle Vague never feels like millennials playing dress up for Netflix. Visually, the film deftly walks the line between a pleasantly faithful analogue-feeling look, and choosing to keep certain modern solutions where their absence would take the audience out of the film. I challenge anyone to watch this film and not be overcome with the desire to make their own. Even if it might not mean getting to shout “Moteur, Raoul!”

Sirāt

The tightrope between heaven and hell is but a trance beat. Sirāt opens on giant rave speakers being stacked in the arid expanse of the Sahara; appearing like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As grimy bass hooks begin to crawl around the giant rocks, a crowd of party-goers appears as if to worship at the speakers. A homogeneously quirky group of all ages, these are white people high on casual cultural appropriation and drug-fuelled delusion. 

Reality elbows its way through in the shape of Luis and Esteban: a father-son duo desperately handing out missing person flyers and asking questions. Luis’ daughter disappeared into the rave scene over six months ago and hasn’t been heard from since. While the pair is treated with respect by the ravers, there is something unsettling about seeing Esteban (hardly more than ten) in this environment. The gathering is broken up by armed militias.

Luis and Esteban have only one lead to follow – another rave is said to be happening soon. They begin tailing the group of friends who told them about the next rave, and soon form an unlikely alliance in pursuit of their shared destination. We drift along in this search until a midpoint twist changes gear entirely, perhaps best captured by the film’s own question, “Is this what the end of the world feels like?”

The sound design is nothing short of extraordinary. It manages to feel both an imperceptibly natural part of the world in ambient rumbles, and a hand reaching out of the speaker to pin you to your seat in anticipation with its heavy beats and trance motifs.

While I personally found Sirāt sadistic and colonial on the whole, I certainly seem to be in the minority, and can readily admit that this Cannes Jury Prize winner is not a film I will forget with any ease. 

The Shepherd and the Bear

A contemplative exploration of man vs. nature through the lens of a rural community in the French Pyrenees. On one side: Yves, the aging shepherd, exhaling his cigarette smoke with the same breath the fog rolls into the valley. A man whose life has been shaped by and sacrificed to the seasons of farming livestock on the mountain. On the other side: the mysterious urban pencil pushers who decree to release bears via helicopter right into Yves’ sanctuary, in the name of conservation. 

Documentary director Max Keegan takes a subtle but firm stand with Yves, elevating his moments of mundanity into visual poetry with impressive drone shots and delicate woodwind melodies. The flock flows through the mountain paths like veins on a beating heart, and Yves pours his evening wine by the blinking fire. The corpse of a half-eaten sheep is served like a gut punch. The bears have arrived, and Yves and his farming community begin to live in fear. Clerical efforts and protests to rectify the situation come and go, and livestock continue to be claimed.

In the meantime, we can assume that the rewilding project is flourishing, succeeding in returning a native species to a habitat they were erased from by men like Yves. Which tradition becomes more important? That of the diminishing rural farming community, or the rule of the untamed mountainside? The Shepherd and the Bear is an intimate portrayal of this struggle, with some truly stunning shots of the French wilderness. 

A Magnificent Life

French national treasure Marcel Pagnol once said he wrote in order to be surrounded by friends and loved ones dead and alive. In this deliciously animated biopic, director Sylvain Chomet enables him to do just that. 

Pagnol, who lived and worked across literature, theatre and film in the 20th century, started writing poems as a young boy, as encouraged by his mother whom he would eventually lose aged fifteen. That young part of himself would become a guiding light to Pagnol, as he held tight to his ambition in the face of meagre crowds, cold Paris apartments, and two world wars. In this film, the boy physically guides him, a relatable and moving device that never veers into sentimentality. 

A gentle orchestral soundtrack guides us through the years, and the tactile pencil lines and warm colours of the animation feel like a hearty soup on a rainy day to our timeline-weary eyes. Although Chomet never dives headfirst into the darker pockets of Pagnol’s life or its historical backdrop, he taps just enough pressure points to avoid making a cinematic puff piece. From Bullock the pet lamb to 1920s Paris come to life, A Magnificent Life is enchanting from start to finish. 

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Penn Balint

Penn is a writer, director and artist. His film Soviet Fantasia is on Channel Four and they have curated films for Two Short Nights and the Dublin Film Festival

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• French Film Festival | From Paris to the Pyrenees - November 11, 2025