What Shall We Do Next? is a project supported by the Institut Français that includes an exhibition and performance by French artist Julien Prévieux presented at DiverseWorks in Houston. It examines how technology and advertising have shifted our relationships to our physical bodies, our shaping of subjectivity, and notions of the real. The exhibition takes its title from a video and performance work by Julien Prévieux that is based on an ensemble of hand gestures that have been patented by a variety of global tech companies. Prévieux’s work speaks to a series of paradoxes in our over-technologized and copyrighted world. The artist asks a number of fundamental questions: Why do we move the way we do? Who owns our gestures? How will we move our bodies in one, ten, or a hundred years?

- Opening reception: January 14, 2016

- Performance: March 12 & 13, 2016

Following a successful first edition in 2015, Young French Cinema, a program of UniFrance films and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States which makes a selection of contemporary French films available for screening at American theaters and venues, is launching its second edition this month. The 2016 program includes independent works, high-profile documentaries, quirky discoveries, and exciting shorts. It showcases a young generation of filmmakers with a global vision and a superior capacity to combine cultural influences and create innovative styles and stories.

The Dallas Museum of Art presents Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle's 1973 film Daddy an angry retort to oppressive regimes, particularly that most destructive one of childhood sexual abuse. While the world created by daddies was steeped in trauma, daughters became seduced by apocalyptic fantasies of overturning the oppressive triptych of patriarchy, religion, and the military-industrial complex.

Oklahoma City Museum of Art presents Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. Five beautiful sisters contend with social and cultural strictures in this beautifully directed debut film. In a Turkish village situated along the Black Sea, Lale and her older siblings celebrate school’s end by frolicking in the sea with some male classmates. At home, their grandmother and uncle find nothing playful in this harmless activity and set about finding eligible bachelors to marry them.

The Ciné Club of Austin's Alliance Française presents Insecure (Qui Vive) by Marianne Tardieu. In this social realist suspense drama, nodding to the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, a middle class nursing student’s part time job as a security guard puts him in the line of fire of some local thugs, who see him as a well-positioned pawn for their criminal schemes.

The Texas Christian University's Department of Modern Language Studies is one of the lucky recipient of the Tournées Festival grant. A program of FACE, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, it brings French cinema to American college and university campuses. All screenings are free and open to the public.

TCU will screen Mood Indigo by Michel Gondry and Timbuktu by Abderrahmane Sissako in January. Stay tuned for 4 more screenings in February!

Each year, we celebrate "la Francophonie" during the month of March in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Interested in getting involved and supporting the Festival? If you wish to volunteer or financially support, please write to: frenchculturesfestival@gmail.com.

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In this course taught by Anna Tahinci at the Glassel School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, students get to live Woody Allen’s fantasy as depicted in his movie Midnight in Paris and travel back in time and space to explore how French and expatriate artists were inspired both verbally and visually by the City of Lights from the beginning of the 19th century until the present. By combining methods of reading excerpts from literature and analyzing visual arts and architecture, students hone interpretation skills across disciplines.