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.
