The Humanities Department at Rust College will host the French Film Festival “for the young who want to go to France”.**
To celebrate Black Women’s History Month, Rust College’s French Film Festival will kick off on April 4 on Rust College campus in the Morehouse Auditorium of the Natalie Doxey Fine Arts Building.
The opening film, Coconut Head Generation, is a documentary about a group of student-activists who run a cinema club at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. The festival will close with a talk by Professor Sheronda Gipson-Marion on Jazz at Resistance which will serve as the introduction for the film Rewind & Play, directed by Alain Gomis, a behind-the-scenes documentary about the American jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk, which will screen on April 12. Professor Maeve Brophy will interpret Thelonious Monk’s Bright Mississippi on April 5.
Six of the seventeen films are directed by women, four of which are directed by women of color.
Highlights for the festival include: the French-Malian-Senegalese romantic drama film, Banel & Adama, which won Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards; Chicken for Linda, an animated musical comedy, winner of many prizes since its premiere in 2023.
The festival’s keynote speaker, woman of color and Associate Professor in Computer Science, Dr. Denise Ferebee, will speak on "Technology, Innovation, Design: Applying Film and Game Industry Techniques to Other Domains" with her special guest, Producer Princeton James, known for Queen Rising, Hoop Street and Pink Fridays.
This Francophone film festival promises to spotlight films created by African and African-French filmmakers and celebrates the many social transformations evident in these works of cinema art. Students of color attending schools in the United States (at Rust College in Mississippi) will have the opportunity to see themselves reflected from an international perspective. The festival aims to provide students and members of the local communities with the opportunity to view films of diversity in genre, language and culture. Audience members will be able to celebrate the cinema art created by and about people identifying as being of African descent.
The festival is a partnership between the college’s Department of Humanities, France’s Albertine Cinémathèque and the Mississippi Humanities Council. Assistant Professor of Spanish, Rachael LeValley, created these partnerships through grants with the intention of nourishing the cultural landscape and celebrating the unique bond between France and the United States and Mississippi specifically! LeValley wishes to emphasize, through the process of curating the films, the unique beauty available through art and cinema, one in which voice and body are seen and heard reaching into and beyond the diaspora to reciprocate the wealth of legacy, to serve to gather us together.
The festival’s sub-theme, “for the young who want to go to France,” is from recruitment effort made between 1910-1920 by Ida B Wells to secure work in France for African-Americans.
The city of Holly Springs, Mississippi, once upon a time, had a movie theatre – the Holly Theatre – which the students of Rust College boycotted in 1962 due to the theatre’s racist business practices. In a city which historically prevented people of African descent from entering theatres simply to watch a film, the Rust College Humanities Department French Film Festival is historic as the city’s first film festival ever to honor and showcase the work of people of African descent, filmmakers, cast, crew and writers! A new day has dawned.
Find out more at
https://www.mshumanities.org/event/rust-co...
Posted By: Reginald Culpepper
Tuesday, April 8th 2025 at 8:34PM
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