La Clef in New York

Last summer, with the help of five thousand individual donations and contributions from Leos Carax, Céline Sciamma, and other cineastes, the collective was able to buy the building. Now another half a million euros or so are needed for renovations, and the aim is to reopen in September. Starting tonight with a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961) at Film Forum, the La Clef team will be in New York for a week to launch a fundraising campaign in the U.S. You don’t have to be in New York to donate.

Godard’s third feature stars Anna Karina as an exotic dancer who wants a baby. Her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) would rather not, but his friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is ready and willing. “The daringly fragmented use of Michel Legrand’s score verges on musique concrète,” writes J. Hoberman, and the “blatant aural cues complement sight gags that would scarcely be out of place in a Frank Tashlin film.” Above all, A Woman Is a Woman is “a valentine to Karina, who became pregnant during the course of the movie’s production; she and Godard were married in March 1961, an event that made the cover of Paris Match.”

Watching Karina “saunter, stare, smile, and sigh through this movie, it’s not hard to see how an entire generation of cinephiles fell in love,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. But the film, “despite its surface frivolity, its confectionary experimentalism, is about a man and a woman who don’t understand one another, but who somehow love each other even more because of it. It’s a fantasy, a comedy, a musical, and a tragedy all at once.” Rialto Pictures’ new restoration screens tomorrow in Los Angeles before heading to Chicago and beyond.

La Clef Revival will be at Anthology Film Archives tomorrow night to cohost a screening of Guy Gilles’s Earthlight (1970). Patrick Jouané stars as Pierre, a twenty-one-year-old wandering Paris and saying his goodbyes to friends young and old before he leaves for his native Tunisia. Writing about this “lush, wistful” film at 4Columns, Melissa Anderson notes that while Pierre’s “lack of attachment to place may leave him perpetually adrift, it also affords him a kind of freedom, untethered from sentimentality.” But he also knows that “he’s not impervious to time . . . This doleful yet beguiling film ends with a title card that reads simply ‘To be continued,’ perhaps the most optimistic way of saying ‘Laughing, crying—time goes by anyway.’”

Team La Clef will discuss their work at Spectacle on Saturday following a screening of Dernier maquis (2008). Director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche plays the owner of an industrial pallet and truck repair yard on the outskirts of Paris. His employees, most of them Arab and African Muslim immigrants, call him Mao, and his attempt to win them over by building a mosque on the yard backfires. When Michael Sicinski saw Dernier maquis in Toronto, he called it an example of “leftist countercinema that dares to be unfashionably pro-worker, that often refrains from stereotype or caricature but also isn’t going to get bogged down in a floppy humanism determined to provide even the exploiter with his best possible argument.”

Ameur-Zaïmeche has been “one of the most fascinating and consistently surprising auteurs to emerge from France these past two decades,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer in his review of The Temple Woods Gang (2023), a heist movie set in a working-class French suburb. Ameur-Zaïmeche has “found purely sensory means to convey the heaviness of death that reigns over The Temple Woods Gang from start to finish,” writes Mintzer, “and he does it in a way that feels both tragic and sublime.” Following next Wednesday’s screening at L’Alliance New York, La Clef programmers will take part in a discussion moderated by critic and translator Nicholas Elliott.

This coming Sunday will find La Clef at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. The evening’s film will be Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), directed by Lina Soualem, the daughter of Hiam Abbass, the Palestinian-born star of Succession, Paradise Now, and Blade Runner 2049. “Blending tender interviews with her mother, camcorder footage from her childhood, and archive footage of Palestine before the devastating 1948 Nakba and its aftermath,” writes Rógan Graham at Little White Lies, “Soualem draws a fractured map that illustrates the disorienting evolution of stolen and abandoned lands.”

Xaraasi Xanne: Crossing Voices(2022), directed by French filmmaker and visual artist Raphaël Grisey and the late Malian photographer and filmmaker Bouba Touré, is “a brisk, whirlwind montage of pan-African history,” writes Emerson Goo for Notebook. Screening Monday at the Maysles Documentary Center, Crossing Voices “draws connections between the colonial destruction of sub-Saharan agro-ecologies, the strikes of migrant workers in France, and the return of some of these migrant workers to West Africa, where in 1977 they founded Somankidi Coura, a farming cooperative based along the Senegal River.” La Clef’s selections for this roaming series make it pretty clear where the collective’s heart and commitments lie.