The 5th annual Chicago French Film Festival (co-presented by the Music Box Theatre, the Cultural Service at the Consulate General of France in Chicago and the Institut français in Paris) will take place from July 31-August 6, 2015 at the Music Box Theatre!

This year’s festival includes a special tribute to director Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue is the Warmest Color) with screenings of Black Venus, Games of Love and Chance and Blame it On Voltaire. Other highlights will include René Clément's Oscar-winning classic Forbidden Games; Breathe, the second feature film by actress-turned-director Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds); and the animated masterpiece The King and the Mockingbird.

Supported by the Cultural Service at the Consulate General of France in Chicago

Following their success in 2013, ChiFouMi (France’s leading association for the promotion of new comic forms) and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design present a new edition of Pierre Feuille Ciseaux, an annual comics residency-lab taking place from July 30 – August 7, 2015 in the week leading up to the Autoptic Festival in Minneapolis.

Additionally, a pre-festival panel and reception will take place at the Alliance Française de Mpls/St Paul on August 5, 2015 from 6:00 - 9:00 pm.

Supported by the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (USA), Le Conseil regional de Franche-Comté (FR), la DRAC de Franche-Comté (FR), and Wallonie-Bruxelles International (BE).

Four days ... thirty-five countries ... countless memories to last all summer long! Pack your bags and get ready for the seventh annual ANDkids World Film Festival featuring an entertaining, educational and diverse lineup of films from around the world for children of all ages. Featuring the French films On The Way to School (2014) and Moomins on the Riviera (2014).

Founded by Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore, the Traverse City Film Festival brings films and filmmakers from around the world to Northern Michigan, including 20 long and short features produced or co-produced by French filmmakers.

French New Wave master Éric Rohmer began in 1990, at the age of 70, to create four romantic fancies, each set in a different season. Like the rest of Rohmer’s canon, they are brilliant, beautiful, truthful, and unhurried. A must see!

Reeling is back in september with the most groundbreaking, outstanding, and diverse selection of LGBT films from around the world, across all categories, spanning so many aspects of the LGBT experience.

Program coming soon!

The 7th Annual Milwaukee Film Festival presents feature films, shorts programs, education screenings, post-film conversations, and panel discussions. The French and Francophone highlights include Don't Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas), A Year in Burgundy , Paulette, Young and Beautiful (Jeune et Jolie) and The Nightengale (Le Promeneur d'Oiseau).

A non-exhaustive list of French or French co-production films to see this summer in theaters, cinemathèques and film centers across the Midwest!

A Grammy-nominated producer, DJ Snake is a Frenchman at the forefront of the trap music movement, having taken the genre to the charts with his 2013 single Turn Down for What featuring Lil Jon. Born William Grigahcine, Snake's production work on Lady Gaga's 2011 effort Born This Way earned him a Grammy nod when it was nominated for Album of the Year in 2012. His big break as a solo artist came late in the year when Turn Down for What featuring Lil Jon arrived and became the most popular crossover trap hit since Baauer's Harlem Shake.

Lollapalooza

Grassroots Music Festival

Winner of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s International Vocal Competition and  the Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition, French/Dominican vocalist Cyrille Aimée is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “one of the most promising jazz singers of her generation.” Cyrille is from Samois-sur-Seine, France, the same village where the legendary Django Reinhardt once lived.

Stromae, the face of a new lost generation, released his first album Cheese in 2010. That same year, Alors on danse exploded onto international charts and propelled him to the rank of a musical phenomenon. With bow-ties and humility, he explains that he “is simply dressed to go to work.” Not without a certain irony, this rejection of trends becomes a trend in itself.The sound of Stromae offers a more “danceable” version of the technotronic and underground house music of early 90s Belgium. The term refers to a new beat close to acid house and techno along with its precursor, 80s Chicago house music.

Ibeyi is a French/Cuban musical duo consisting of twin sisters, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz who are quickly collecting critical acclaim and many fans around the world. The twins' father is the late famed Cuban percussionist, Anga Díaz, who was a member of Buena Vista Social Club.

Brigitte is a French indie-pop duo formed in 2008 by Sylvie Hoarau and Aurélie Saadaa. A throwback to the 60s flower power era, the band's revivalist tendencies were highlighted on their 2011 debut album, Et vous, tu m'aimes? which reached platinum status in France and gold around Europe. The female duo combines lounge-pop, retro-folk, and French cabaret to produce an authentic, hippie-chic sound that is infectious and sensual. The band's second album, À Bouche que veux-tu, was released last year; its lush arrangements render it distinctly French. This will be Brigitte's first ever performance in Chicago. Not to be missed!

France Rocks is back for this second edition of its College Radio compilation, with fifteen of the most exciting acts coming out of France today, from international pop superstars like Stromae, Lilly Wood & the Prick, and Christine and the Queens to up-and-coming underground electro acts like Cotton Claw, Bobmo, and Einleit, with everything in between for your listening pleasure.

Check out the artists by visiting their France Rocks pages for more detailed info, news, and tour dates!

The Art Institute of Chicago joins forces with The Arts Club of Chicago to host a pair of exhibitions featuring the work of French artist Jean-Luc Mylayne. The shows unite inside and outside, nature and culture, and bring together again two Chicago institutions that have deep historical ties. Further connecting the twin exhibitions is a third element, a public building in Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden featuring a 30-foot-long photographic fresco covering its entire ceiling.

With the opening of Japan in the 1850s, Japanese art became more readily available to Europeans, and in France it sparked Japonisme. For most Parisians, Japonisme was no more than a fad, but for printmakers, the influx of Japanese art — Japanese prints in particular — was a bombshell. French printmakers were inspired by these images that were at once recognizable and yet wholly unfamiliar. The works in this exhibition draw from the Chazen’s collection of prints to compare the works of French printmakers to the Japanese prints that inspired them.

This exhibit links the vibrant legacy of the 1960s African American avant-garde to current art and culture. It is occasioned in part by the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians whose interdiscliplinary explorations expanded the boundaries of jazz. Combining historical materials with contemporary responses, The Freedom Principle illuminates the continued relevance of that engagement today. Featuring the work of French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

Drawn entirely from the holdings of the Toledo Museum of Art, From the Collection: 300 Years of French Landscape Painting contains a single, stunning example selected from each of the many styles that define the French tradition of depicting scenes in nature. This one-gallery focus show begins with Claude Lorrain’s 17th-century classicism and Boucher’s Rococo fantasy and continues through the 19th century with Valenciennes (Neo-classicism), Rousseau (Barbizon School), Courbet (Realism), Renoir (Impressionism) and Cézanne (Post-Impressionism), and concludes in the early 20th century with the Fauvism of Derain.

North Korea is one of the most reclusive states in the world. The exhibition North Korean Perspectives is divided into two main sections: one showing the government’s official version of North Korea, and the other one exposing a non-controlled stream of images (such as work produced by international photojournalists inside North Korea, Google Earth images analyzed by archivists and researchers, and works directly addressing North Korea). The exhibit features works by French artists Pierre Bessard, Philippe Chancel and Marie Voignier.

French artists Anne Gilbert and Hélène Dureau Martini are both painters who choose to work on paper, yet their process and purpose are quite different. While Gilbert works with the fragile line, seeing what impact it may reveal, Dureau Martini emphasizes shape and color in a manner which might be seen as so repetitive that it borders on obsession. They work to confront and find an answer for the question that lies at the core of their work: what is fragility? How can one convey this in painting?

Of all the Impressionists who focused on modern life, Edgar Degas was the most dedicated to the classical tradition of depicting the human form, especially that form in movement. In this focused exhibition, two exceptional loans — a remarkable painting from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey; and a beloved sculpture from a private Chicago collection, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen — join other loans and paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculpture from the Art Institute’s permanent collection to explore the artist’s career-long fascination with the figure in motion through the subjects of the racetrack and ballet.

French feminist and avant-garde filmmaker Agnès Varda puts films in her photos, and photos, potatoes, and shells in her films and video-installations. The exhibition proposes a dialogue between still photography and moving pictures. Four recent video-installations will be presented alongside a selection of her photographic work exploring or questioning the polarity between still and moving, broken and continuous, fleeting and fixed or captured.

Agnes Varda is scheduled to be in residence at the University of Chicago from Oct 7-17, 2015.

Agnes Varda' s residency is supported by the Institut Français and Unifrance Films.

French Twist features 100 vintage prints from the golden age of French photography, 1910–1940. The exhibition celebrates the variety and inventiveness of native and immigrant photographers working in France in the early 20th century. The selection encompasses Eugène Atget’s lyrical views of Paris streets and gardens, Man Ray’s surrealist experiments, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering photojournalism, as well as works by Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, André Kertész, and Dora Maar.All works are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

EXPO CHICAGO has announced the full schedule for /Dialogues to take place during the fourth annual exposition, Sept. 17 – 20, 2015. Presented in partnership with the Institut Français and the Cultural Service at the Consulate General of France in Chicago, The French-American Curatorial Exchange | Leaving the Canvas: Abstract Art and Architecture Panel featuring Artist Daniel Buren, Collector Nicolas Cattelain, and Artist Felice Varini, moderated and organized by French Independent Art Historian, Critic and Curator Matthieu Poirier will take place on September 19th.

Celebrated stage and screen actress Juliette Binoche plays Antigone in a contemporary version of Sophokles’ tragedy, translated afresh by Anne Carson, a T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet, MacArthur “Genius” grant winner, and former University of Michigan Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature.

When her dead brother is decreed a traitor and his body left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone refuses to accept this most severe of punishments. Defying her uncle, who governs Thebes, she forges ahead with a funeral, placing personal allegiance before politics. This treacherous act will trigger a cycle of destruction. Director Ivo van Hove “has been building steadily on his reputation as one of the most affecting and clearest-sighted directors working in world theater. His intense and solemn work is designed to shake us to the core.” (The Guardian) 

French cartoonist and publisher Jean-Christophe Menu and Belgian graphic novel artist Dominique Goblet will give a lecture and sign books in this exceptional event!

Jean-Christophe Menu founded the seminal French alternative publishing house l'Association in 1990. Dominique Goblet is a member of the Belgian publishing group Fremok. She publishes graphic novels and produces fine-art exhibits.

Don't miss this unique opportunity to learn more about an original Francophone art form!

The French Embassy offers financial aid to American institutions universities, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and other venues across the United States wishing to host French authors for readings, signings, and symposia. The authors listed below are currently available for booking this fall:

FALL UPDATE: Sylvie Tissot, Antonio Casilli, Malika Ferdjoukh, Béatrice Alemagna, Marianne Rubinstein, Marc Dugain and Réjane Sénac have joined the group of authors touring with us this fall.

Once again, 2015 is filled with a multitude of French translated books, for all tastes and ages, to escape or educate, to discover and learn.

We invite you to browse this year's inventory of recently translated French books available in the US, whether you are looking for a beach read or something to save for later and read by the fireplace!

Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano's story "Page-A-Day" is included in the Summer Reading edition of Tin House magazine. The short piece, wonderfully translated by Edward Gauvin, serves as an "ideal introduction," with Modiano's hallmark themes of Paris, memory, loss, and time balanced by introspective prose.

Youna Kwak's essay "You" is featured this week in The Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.  In the poetic essay, Kwak expores Barthes' imagined addressee in his later works written in the first person.

The breadth of France’s tech sector was on display this past week. From French music-streaming services and educational startups to the deployment of an IdeasBox in the Bronx and France’s recognition of a MOOC-based bachelors degree, here's what you need to know.

Applications are now open for the first session of the French-American Digital Lab, a creative workshop for startups and content creators from the cultural sector. The program will help young innovators break into the French and American markets by providing them with market insights, individual mentorship, and connections to cultural institutions. It will take place twice per year, alternating between New York and Paris, and is produced by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Business France in partnership with major incubators (Numa, Gaîté Lyrique, Créatis, and Paris&Co in Paris). The French-American Digital Lab is also supported by the City of Paris and by Orange, as part of the company’s larger strategic plan to support open investment. Session 1: New York will be hosted by the Made in New York Media Center by IFP and will take place from in November 16 to November 25, 2015.

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States is thrilled to launch the France on Campus Award aimed at student organizations eager to produce creative events on their campus while introducing new audiences to French culture. Projects can encompass all fields, including (but not limited to) the arts, new media, science, technology, politics, literature, and even food! Participants are strongly encouraged to think out of the box and present original, innovative projects. The first place winner will receive a grant to implement the proposed project, support from the Cultural Services to develop the project, and a letter of commendation signed by the Ambassador of France to the United States.

This award is open to any student organization affiliated with an American college or university. Applications will be open from September 30 until November 15. This award is not limited to student organizations with strong ties to France.

To receive more information, send us an email