Known as the French Institute Alliance Française until 2024, L’Alliance New York has a long history of presenting a wide range of films from France and French-speaking countries around the world. Along with its rebranding, L’Alliance New York hired Jake Perlin as its full-time film curator. Perlin was the founding artistic director of Metrograph, and has also been an associate film programmer at BAM and a curator-at-large at Lincoln Center. He has collaborated with many film organizations throughout the city, including L’Alliance New York, where he worked with past curator Marie Losier in the early 2000s, and then with his predecessor, Delphine Selles-Alvarez, who continues to program the annual Animation First festival (with Cinema Manager Chloe Dheu). This program includes two short films, and a new restoration of The Bad Son, directed by Claude Sautet, an important French filmmaker whose works are rarely shown at other venues in the city.
Papillon. 2024. France. Directed by Florence Miailhe. 15 min. In French, Arabic, German; English subtitles. DCP. 15 min.
This meditative film follows a man swimming in the sea.
Agua (Water). 1989. Senegal. Directed by Samba Félix Ndiaye. DCP. 12 min.
Agua condenses the daylong task of creating beautiful, delicate botanical marines in glass bowls—from catching the fish to inserting flowers—into a 10-minute masterclass of economy.
Un mauvais fils (A Bad Son). 1980. France. Directed by Claude Sautet. Written by Daniel Biasini, Sautet, Jean-Paul Török. With Patrick Dewaere, Yves Robert, Briggitte Fossey, Jacques Dufilho. 110 mins.
Sautet breaks with the bourgeois settings that had established him as the reigning film chronicler of upper-middle-class French life in the 1970s to focus on Bruno Calcagni, a young man who returns to Paris after spending five years in a US prison on narcotics charges. Patrick Dewaere brings remarkable intensity to the role of Bruno, portraying a longtime drug user confronting his demons.
After the screenings, Jake Perlin will have a discussion with series programmer David Schwartz.