European Union Film Festival in Chicago

In two weeks the 14th annual European Union Film Festival kicks off at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The festival will run from March 4th-31st, and features 64 films from 24 countries.

The festival includes 9 films that represented their countries in the competition for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the Academy Awards.

Also featured is a film I mentioned in a previous post, Two in the Wave, a documentary on the friendship between Godard and Truffaut.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll get to see the documentary but we do plan a quick trip to Chicago for a few films. If you make it for any part of the festival let us know what you saw.

Truffaut and Godard

As admirers of the French New Wave directors, particularly Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, we can't pass up news related to the Nouvelle Vague.

The new documentary, Two in the Wave, to be released on DVD this month (after screening at limited theatres in the U.S. last year) focuses on the relationship between the two directors—their early friendship and collaborations, along with their writing for Cahier du Cinema through their estrangement.

The film is directed by Emmanuel Laurent with Antoine de Baecque (a biographer of both Godard and Truffaut) contributing the script and narration.

At the Financial Times Tobias Grey takes a look at the two directors and the film documenting their different personalities and cinematic ambitions:

In their documentary Laurent and De Baecque shun a talking-heads approach and instead make judicious use of newspaper clippings, film clips, archive documentary footage and photographs to tell the story of how Godard and Truffaut began by sharing the same dream of cinema, only to end up each hating the other for the kind of films he made.... For a while Truffaut and Godard managed to ignore their creative differences and their friendship flourished. But tensions began to surface during the political upheaval of 1968. While Godard embraced Marxism and signalled his determination to make politically driven, elliptical films, Truffaut steadfastly refused to mix cinema and politics.

Eventually the friendship completely dissolved, in part over a dispute involving a letter sent by Godard to Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor who appeared in many of Truffaut's films.