University of South Carolina Sumter

USC Sumter announces film series selections

The annual USC Sumter Summer Film Series opens June 2, 2008. The Summer Film Series this year will once again feature recent French-language films as part of the Tournees Festival sponsored by the French American Cultural Exchange < www.facecouncil.org >.

Each screening will take place Monday nights at 7:00 pm in the Nettles Auditorium, which has been newly equipped with a projector, and should be a great place to watch these films. Feel free to pass this message along to anyone who might be interested. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I look forward to seeing you there!

All events are free and open to the public.

The series schedule is:

June 2 Paris, Je T'aime
Paris, je t'aime is about the plurality of cinema in one mythic location: Paris, the City of Love. Twenty filmmakers will bring their own personal touch, underlining the wide variety of styles, genres, encounters and the various atmospheres and lifestyles that prevail in the neighborhoods of Paris. Each director has been given five minutes of freedom, and we, as producers, carry the responsibility of weaving a single narrative unit out of those twenty moments.
June 9 La Jetée and The Case of the Grinning Cat
In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful.
June 16 Days of Glory
Algeria, 1943, through Italy and France, to Alsace in early 1945, with a coda years later. Arabs volunteer to fight Nazis to liberate France, their motherland. We follow Saïd, dirt poor, an orderly for a grizzled sergeant, Martinez, a pied noir with some willingness to speak up for his Arab troops; Messaoud, a crack shot, who in Province falls in love with a French woman who loves him back; and Abdelkader, a corporal, a budding intellectual with a keen sense of injustice. The men fight with courage against a backdrop of small and large indignities: French soldiers get better food, time for leave, and promotions. Is the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity hollow?
June 23 Le Petit Lieutenant
When a fresh young police academy graduate from provincial Le Havre volunteers for the high pressure world of the Parisian homicide squad, his schoolteacher wife is reluctant to go with him. He moves into a rooming house that caters to single cops as he embraces his fellow officers as an extended family. He becomes close to an Arab officer and his boss, a very professional but lonely, middle-aged female detective who is also a recovering alcoholic. Routine police procedure gives way to an intensive search among the city's homeless for an undocumented Russian immigrant who may be responsible for a series of violent crimes.
June 30 Private Fears in Public Places
Seven lonely lives in Paris: a middle-aged estate agent who thinks a colleague is sending messages in video tapes she loans him; his co-worker whose Bible is close at hand in times of stress; her late-night charge, who's an angry, nasty bedridden old man; his son, a patient bartender; the bartender's best patron, an ex-soldier who's lost his moorings while his fiancée looks for a large flat for them; and, the estate agent's much younger sister, who answers ads in the personal and waits in cafés with a red flower pinned on her jacket. Will any connect? Can open hearts trump fears?

“The Tournées Festival was made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC).”
“Sponsored by The Florence Gould Foundation, the Grand Marnier Foundation, highbrow entertainment, agnès b. and the Franco-American Cultural Fund.”