Can the American French Film Festival’s high-school screenings programme help to woo young audiences?

Will a black-and-white film in French set in 1959, not based on existing IP, not studio-produced, and without A-list stars, be the key to getting the TikTok generation excited about filmmaking and cinema?

That is the ambition behind the High School Screenings programme, a long-running initiative of the American French Film Festival (TAFFF) that runs across five days from October 27 at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) complex in Los Angeles. 

The 18^th annual edition of the programme will see 3,000 high-school students from 55 schools attend five daily screenings of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, complete with Q&A sessions with Linklater, stars Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck, and producer-writer Michele Halberstadt Petin of ARP. 

This year’s programme is supported by Netflix (which has North American rights to Nouvelle Vague) and European Languages & Movies in America (ELMA). 

“The film shows young people taking a camera and making art and improvising and making things happen,” says Pascal Ladreyt, founder of ELMA. “It makes filmmaking approachable and accessible.”

Nouvelle Vague, which will be TAFFF’s centrepiece gala at the festival, running October 28-November 3, follows the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless, a pivotal moment in the French New Wave. 

“Nouvelle Vague is a film about youth and enthusiasm,” Linklater told Screen earlier this year. “Of course it is a film for cinephiles, but to see people having fun and creating doesn’t alienate anyone, it invites them in. It’s a peek into this wonderful parallel world that exists that you can be a part of just by loving cinema.

“I’m excited for yet another generation of film students to dive in and experience the language and energy of the Nouvelle Vague and be inspired to make their own bold choices.” 

The film will screen for free each morning to students from across Southern California (and from a school in Park City, Utah), spanning  public and private schools. The American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) has developed an accompanying curriculum for the screenings. 

“The programme introduces students not only to this particular film, but for many of them, one of the first subtitled films they’ve ever seen, to French cinema and its history,” says ELMA director Malin Kan.

French tradition 

TAFF’s High School Screenings programme echoes a longstanding tradition in France of government-funded educational programmes via the Ministry of Culture and the CNC that foster cinemagoing from elementary school through university. 

“The work of distributors and cinemas has been built up for the past 20 or 30 years, and audiences have evolved with it,” explains Marc-Olivier Sebbag, head of FNCF, France’s distributors’ organisation. “It is a national arthouse policy that is constructed with long-term ambitions. It hasn’t been an overnight sensation.”

Anouchka van Riel, deputy director of TAFFF, points out how the high-school screenings programme aligns with this work. 

“The question for every distributor today is, ‘Where do we find audiences?’”, she says. “The answer is: ‘We have to grow them from an early age, and festivals like ours are the best place to do that.’”

Citing today’s “brutal market economy,” she adds: “The work we do hand in hand with ELMA contributes a little piece to the market economy of the studios.”

“With this programme, we have found the right tone, the right niche to interest this young generation,” adds France-born, Los Angeles-based Ladreyt. “We are onto something the entire industry can learn from.” 

Last year, the High School Screenings presented Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre De La Patelliere’s epic literary adaptation The Count Of Monte-Cristo, a Samuel Goldwyn release in the US. The distributor went on to send newsletters with information about the film to the teachers involved in the programme to activate that network as part of its general release strategy. The film grossed $530,000 at the US box office when it was released last December.

“The film was a huge box office success in France and resonated with younger audiences there, so we wanted to see if we could replicate that here in the US,” says Zach Martin, director of marketing and PR at Samuel Goldwyn, who notes that the TAFFF. 

“It was a huge success on VoD [in the US], one of our biggest titles ever,” he adds.

Martin says that the TAFFF screenings were met with enthusiasm from the participants. “There was definitely strong word of mouth from students to both their peers and parents,” he says. 

Nouvelle Vague will stream on Netflix in the US from November 14, preceded by a two-week awards-qualifying theatrical run.

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