French Film Festival starts today

This year's festival begins today (Friday) and runs until December 6 at the Riverwalk New Capitol Cinemas. The main objective of hosting the French Film Festival in Gaborone is to give the audience an opportunity to discover French cinema, both past and present, as French films are seldom shown in the country via the commercial circuits. The festival will feature a variety of movies - from children's cartoons, and comedies, to French classics catering for everyone's taste. The line-up includes movies produced in the Southern hemisphere.

Amongst the films on the programme is the documentary, The Besieged Fortress, which will be shown tomorrow (December 1) and Wednesday. In this film, which takes place in southeastern Burkina Faso, termites are hard at work in the safety of their high tower when drama turns their neat orderly life upside down. A deluge of tropical rain floods galleries and chambers, causing cracks and breaches to appear in the termite's castle. Not far from there, a colony of terrible, carnivorous ants prepares to attack, and they take advantage of the tower's fragility to launch a veritable assault. As a result, a merciless war ensues. The film's strongest asset is undoubtedly the use of boroscope, a revolutionary tool that enables to shoot crystal clear images from five centimeters to infinity, so that the viewer is transposed in the animal's real-scale environment. Directed by Phillippe Calderon it runs for 82 minutes.

Other films to be shown include Rice People, a fiction drama directed by Rithy Panh. The film takes the viewer through a fiction scenes guaranteed to keep them interested. The story line starts with people who had an easy life, enjoying rice without ever having to cultivate it, to watch over it or harvest it. The norm was that as soon as the rice ripened it would fly to heaven before taking its place in the village storehouses. That however changes, following a violent argument between a man and his wife near the storehouse and in her anger the woman hit the grains with a piece of wood. The Rice God took offence and abandoned the village. As famine struck the country, the villagers sent as their emissary Slat, the flatfish, who described their grief  to the Rice God and managed to calm his anger and bring him back down to the plains. But the Rice God laid down certain conditions.

The festival will also cater for children in terms of showing cartoon. The festival will feature Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005), animated film directed by Michel Ocelot and Benedicte Galup. The film tells the story of 'Kirikou and the Sorceress'.

It takes the viewer through inventive Kirikou became a gardener, detective, potter, merchant, and doctor-always the smallest but bravest hero. The film runs for 1 hour 36 minutes.

Another film to be screened, which might be of interest to cinema lovers, is Zulu Love Letter, directed by Ramadan Suleman. This South African movie takes a look at some of the nasty things that happened during the Apartheid years.

Other films to be screened include Mr Klein (1976) directed by Joseph Losey, L. 627 directed by Bertrand Tavernier, Hyenas (1992) directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, Tanguy (2001) directed by Etienne Chatiliez, Army of Shadows directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, Asterix and Obelix: Cleopatra (2002) and Little Jerusalem (2004).

Admission is free for all the films subject to availability of seats. Member of the public interested in viewing any of the films showing, during the French Film Festival week can get a detailed programme at the New Capitol Cinemas, Alliance Francaise and the Embassy of France.

The 2007 French Film Festival of Gaborone is organised jointly by the Alliance Francaise of Gaborone and the Embassy of France to Botswana with the support of Orange, AGS, Barclays, BVI, Peugeot Motors, Air Liquide, and the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture of Botswana.