Across Generations Film Festival 2023
4 videos • 2 views • by Columbia Maison Française Produced and presented by the Columbia Maison Française Additional support provided by the Knapp Family Foundation, Villa Albertine, and Columbia University’s Alliance Program, Department of History, Institute of African Studies, European Institute, and Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities Curated by Shanny Peer, Fanny Guex, and Ilana Custos-Quatreville Columbia University’s Maison Française presents six films in its 2023 film festival, Across Generations: Unveiling the Past, Embracing the Present. Five of the films are documentaries and one is an historical fiction. Two are U.S. premieres. Five are recent releases, one has become a reference film, and all are French productions or co-productions. The films selected for this festival all explore memories and intergenerational connections within families that reach into the past and help shape the present. They share a number of common themes and storytelling devices in striking ways. Each of the films makes use of personal photographs, home movies, and other private or public archival images—or missing pictures in the case of Rithy Panh’s film—combined with interviews, investigating these visual and oral memories to decipher individual, family, and generational histories and identities and the ways these evolve over time and across national and social boundaries. These movies masterfully weave together past and present, microhistory and macrohistory—whether it’s the history of colonization and decolonization in the Congo (Colette and Justin) and Mali (Dancing the Twist in Bamako), the Cambodian genocide (The Missing Picture), post-colonial immigration of Moroccan workers to France (The Life Ahead of Us), the legacy of international adoption (A Story of One’s Own), or French family life and gender roles in the burgeoning middle classes of the 1970s (Les Années Super 8).