French Film Festival Opens with Oscar Winner Claude Lelouch's Everyone’s Life

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Category: Entertainment News

Published on Thursday, 20 April 2017 06:16

Written by Janet Walker

The Franco-American Cultural Fund is pleased to announce the dates for the 21st Anniversary of the COLCOA French Film Festival, "9 Days of Premieres in Hollywood" will take place April 24 - May 2, 2017.

Opening the festival with the North American Premiere of Director Claude Lelouch’s Everyone’s Life, a comedy, drama, romance, starring Eric Dupond-Moretti, Johnny Hallyday, Nadia Fares, Jean Dujardin, Christopner Lambert, Beatrice Dalle, Marianne Denicourt and Mathilde Seigner.

Celebrating his 50-year career, Director Claude Lelouch wanted to try something a little more daring and ambitious. So, he gathered a veritable battalion of name actors in a provincial town in the Burgundy region.

The result is a new film that playfully deconstructs narrative conventions while asking who among us has the moral right to sit in judgment of another?

A jazz festival is swinging in the town of Beaune, but 12 men and 12 women have gathered for a different reason.

A trial is taking place and they are here for the dispensation of justice, such as it is. Yet each of these judges, lawyers, or jurors--people from every walk of life--has a skeleton or two tucked in a closet: a billionaire who tries to seduce a tax inspector with a diamond necklace, an aging prostitute who confesses to a customer that he may play a role in the memoir she is writing, the real Johnny Hallyday who wants to press charges against a troublesome look-alike.   

With a feature count fast approaching 50, writer/director Claude Lelouch remains a fixed point in the firmament of French cinema, a remarkable achievement given his reverence for chance and unpredictability on the set.

According to first-time writing collaborator Grégoire Lacroix, the veteran director’s working motto is "accept the inevitable in order to be available for the unexpected."  This approach served Lelouch well in 1966, when his sentimental love story, A Man and a Woman, rocketed him to international fame, along with a Palme d’Or and a Foreign Language Oscar. 

Although some have tended to brush Lelouch aside in recent years, his previous film Un + Une (COLCOA 2016) was a major success. Always looking for ways to translate his personal experience onto the screen, Lelouch was inspired this time by a court hearing he attended. From there, Lelouch developed the script with Lacroix, along with his longtime writing partner Pierre Uytterhoeven (with whom Lelouch shared a Best Screenplay Oscar in 1966), and his companion, Valérie Perrin.

EVERYONE’S LIFE / Chacun sa vie  will open the festival North American Premiere • Comedy, Drama, Romance • France, 2017; 113 min; Directed by: Claude Lelouch; Written by: Claude Lelouch, Valérie Perrin, Grégoire Lacroix, Pierre Uytterhoeven. Cast: Éric Dupond-Moretti (The Judge), Johnny Hallyday (Johnny), Nadia Farès (Nadia), Jean Dujardin (Jean), Christopher Lambert (Antoine de Vidas ), Béatrice Dalle (Clémentine), Marianne Denicourt (Marianne), Mathilde Seigner (Mathilde).

COLCOA FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Announces 21st Edition Dates:
April 24 - May 2, 2017

The Franco-American Cultural Fund is pleased to announce the dates for the 21st Anniversary of the COLCOA French Film Festival which will take place April 24 - May 2, 2017.

COLCOA FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL, "9 Days of Premieres in Hollywood", was founded in 1997 by The Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique collaborative effort of the Directors Guild of America, the Motion Picture Association, the Writers Guild of America West, and France’s Society of Authors Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM). COLCOA is also supported by l’Association des Auteurs-Réalisateurs-Producteurs (ARP), the Film and TV Office of the French Embassy in Los Angeles (French Consulate), the CNC, TVFI, and UNIFRANCE.

COLCOA is the acronym of “City of Light, City of Angels” the original name of an event celebrating relationships between filmmakers from two capital cities of cinema.

Since 2015, the festival’s name has officially become COLCOA FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL. The festival takes place in April in the prestigious theaters of the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood (3 theaters (600, 160 and 37 seats), a 210 capacity lounge and a 1,500 capacity lobby).

The 21st Annual COLCOA FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL will have an exclusive program of 70+ French Films at this year's festival. All premieres will be held from April 24 - May 2, 2017 at the Directors Guild of America,  7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046  

COLCOA FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL is committed to promoting new French films in the U.S. and to showcasing in Hollywood the vitality and the diversity of French cinema and, since 2015, French television programs.

More Information:  http://www.colcoa.org/

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