Director Sophie Fiennes is given special focus. Celebrated for her work with Michael Clark, Grace Jones, Les ballets C de la B and Anselm Kieffer, Fiennes’ work often explores process and performance.
Ciné Lumière is a much valued resource and some films in this season represent key influences and rites of passage for me,” she says. “My two recent films put acting at their heart. They were shot and edited at interconnected times, one feeding and informing the other; both reframe classic texts to illuminate infinite registers of reality that cinema makes possible.
Acting (2024) is a richly detailed and immersive documentary that offers privileged access to the world of international theatre company Cheek by Jowl, creating the first in-depth documentation of the process and philosophy in their vital work with actors. Screen Daily said of the film, “Describing an actor’s process is notoriously tricky; Acting instantly soars to the top of the class.” The screening on Wednesday 7 May is followed by a Q&A with Cheek by Jowl directors Declan Donnellan (also author of The Actor and The Target, and The Actor and The Space), Nick Ormerod and Sophie Fiennes, chaired by critic and broadcaster Sarah Crompton. Acting will be released in Autumn 2025.
In 2020, Ralph Fiennes, (Cheek by Jowl alumnus), set himself the challenge of committing Four Quartets to memory, and in 2021 brought it to the London and UK stage. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (2022), is Ralph Fiennes’s performance, translated from stage to screen, by his sister Sophie. The screening on 12 May is followed by a Q&A with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Fiennes, and chaired by poet, playwright, and novelist Glyn Maxwell.
To accompany these recent films, Ciné Lumière revisits classic titles that capture drama and passion on and off stage. The season opens with Marcel Carné’s epic masterpiece Les Enfants du paradis (1945) and continues with François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980), Ernst Lubitsch’s rarely shown comedy and political satire, To Be or Not to Be (1942) and John Cassavetes’s astonishing stage and screen opus Opening Night (1977), featuring the incandescent Gena Rowlands.
Other highlights include one of prolific French director Quentin Dupieux’s recent comedies, Yannick (2023), which questions both the idea of acting and what it means to lock an audience in a room and ‘force’ them to watch a play.
Younger audiences will also take centre-stage with two French animation films. Houdini (2014) explores how Harry became the stage magician the world knows today and A Monster in Paris (Un Monstre à Paris, 2011) which pays tribute to The Phantom of the Opera and Beauty & the Beast in the Paris of 1910 through the voices of Vanessa Paradis and Sean Lennon.
Venue
Ciné Lumière at the Institut français, 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DT
Press contact
Natacha Antolini: natacha.antolini@institut-francais.org.uk / 020 7871 3520