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The 26th Annual Festival of Films in French runs from Friday, February 17 through Sunday, February 26, 2023.  Women’s & Gender Studies is proud to be a co-sponsor of this event.

This festival attends to women’s choices and showcases adaptations and transpositions to the silver screen while travelling from Quebec to Belgium and France and onto Madagascar with generational stories about survival and exile, histories of decolonization and discrimination, and documentaries about state repression (Un pays qui se tient sage) and capitalist ventures (Étoile du matin). Where opening night features two stories of young women facing unwanted pregnancies in France in the 1960s (L’événement) and ’70s (Annie colère), Alice Diop’s Saint Omer revisits the court case of a woman’s infanticide. Arlette! follows the challenges a young minister of culture faces in the Quebec government and Germaine Dulac’s 1920s scientist must choose between her career and her family (La mort du soleil). The lives of two towering figures – Simone Veil and Frantz Fanon – retrace the fight for human rights and justice of the last century. While sons (Les secrets de mon père) and grandsons (Interdit aux chiens et aux Italiens) reconnect using animation with their families’ silenced past of the Holocaust and 1920s economic exile from Italy, African American soldiers’ experiences after WWI in France are documented in Fighting for Respect and La permission recounts a GI’s leave from his base in 1967 France. Our classic this year comes with a twist. It is the 2021 adaptation of Balzac’s Illusions perdues, which contrasts with the 2019 staging of Rameau’s 1735 Les Indes galantes with urban dance forms taking center stage at the Bastille Opera, and the super 8 texture of the Ernaux family films. Join us for 17 films that remember and story ethical and existential truths for today and tomorrow.

The 51���� French Program is most grateful to the Albertine Cinémathèque, a program of FACE Foundation and Villa Albertine, with support from the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma), and SACEM/Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain.

We extend our profound appreciation to the Quebec Government Office in Chicago for its continued support.

We value the community sponsorship of the Alliance Française of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee French Immersion School, and SWAAF (Southeast Wisconsin Academic Alliance in French).

The film Simone le voyage du siècle is in memory of Nicole Darmon Chandler, a former president of the Alliance française de Milwaukee.

Our thanks go to HOME & the Lynden Sculpture Garden for their renewed support.

We also thank our many 51���� co-sponsors, past and present: Student Involvement, Union Cinema, the Department of Global Studies, the Master of Arts in Language, Literature, and Translation (MALLT), the Film Studies Program, the Department of Dance, the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres, the Center for International Education’s U.S. Department of Education Title VI NRC Grant, the College of Letters and Science, the 51���� OSHER French Class in honor of Professors Gabrielle Verdier and Jim Mileham, as well as the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies and the Institute of World Affairs.

We extend a special note of gratitude to Professor Martine Meyer (1929-2013) and Professor Emerita Gabrielle Verdier for their vision in establishing the 51���� Festival of Films in French.

Interested in a Scholarship?

In anticipation of Women’s History Month (March), during February each year Women’s & Gender Studies hosts the annual 

Undergraduate or graduate research papers or projects having to do with women, gender, sexuality, feminism or feminist thinking which were completed for UWinteriM, Spring, Summer, or Fall 2022 courses at 51���� are eligible for entry. Prizes will be awarded in the following four categories:

• Undergraduate Research Paper: This paper, a minimum of five, double-spaced, typed pages, must demonstrate original thinking and critical engagement with the use of primary and/or secondary sources. (Book reports will not be accepted.)
• Undergraduate Project: Projects could include, for example, an individual piece or portfolio of artwork, video production, curriculum design, musical composition, architectural or engineering design, original literary piece such as a poem or short story, or essay based primarily on personal or autobiographical reflection. Submit your project in a digital format that shows it best to the review committee. You may take photographs, videos, or any other transmissible digital format.
• Graduate Research Paper: This paper, approximately 10-20 double-spaced, typed pages will likely utilize primary sources such as documents, statistical data, or interviews in an original research project written for a graduate course or seminar, or in an independent study.
• Graduate Project: Projects could include, for example, an individual piece or portfolio of artwork, video production, curriculum design, musical composition, architectural or engineering design, or original literary piece such as a poem or short story. Projects should demonstrate a professional level of expertise. Submit your project in a digital format that shows it best to the review committee. You may take photographs, videos, or any other transmissible digital format.

Submission guidelines:

• Written work must be typed, double-spaced, with a one inch margin: all pages should be numbered consecutively (including the bibliography). Your name should not appear anywhere on your paper or your abstract.
• All projects should be presented in as professional a manner as possible
• The paper or project submitted for consideration may be a revision of the original submitted for the course.

All entries are judged anonymously, and all judges’ decisions are final.

The Casey O’Brien Activist Award is now open in the scholarship portal!

The award is given in recognition of student activism (on or off-campus) and leadership within the areas of women’s issues, gender and sexual equality, and social or racial justice. Applications are accepted during February each year leading up to Women’s History Month (March).

Casey O’Brien was a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies for ten years, beginning in 2008. She served a critical role in the development of the WGS undergraduate program, developing the course, WGS 211: Foundations of Women’s and Gender Studies Writing and Research, launching the WGS TA mentorship, and engaging students in service learning. As a result of her pedagogical innovations in the classroom, outstanding rapport with students, commitment to feminist teaching methods, and enthusiasm about the subject matter, she became an indispensable member of our teaching staff and a very popular teacher among our students, undergraduate and graduate alike.

Current bachelor’s degree students with a Women’s and Gender Studies major or minor, WGS master’s students, and WGS graduate certificate students, whose activism and leadership address gender equality and/or social and racial justice, are eligible to apply .

Iranian director and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi spent two years in Evin Prison, now famous around the globe, after her arrest in 2014 for charges of endangering national security and more, based on her documentary work; Son-Mother (2019) is her first feature-length fictional work and the first film she made after being released from Evin. In the film, Leila is a single working mom of two. When she loses her factory job, Kazem, the factory bus driver, proposes marriage to Leila, but she hesitates to accept his conditions, which will tear her family apart.

Join us for a screening of the film, followed by a discussion of the work as well as its connection to the ongoing revolution in Iran: Monday, November 28, at 6:00pm in Mitchell B91.