There are few film festivals in the city of Toronto as broad reaching and as established as the now 17 year old CineFranco Festival, kicking off once again this weekend from The Royal Cinema. Begun in 1997 by Marcel Lean, the festival has always explored a broad range of genres, cinematic styles, and theories when it comes to bringing the best in French language cinema to the largely English speaking portion of Canada.
Featuring French language films from around the world, never just France or Canada. This year’s line-up of 25 features and 12 shorts include entries from Tunisia, Switzerland, Belgium, Morocco, and Algeria spread out across ten days of screening from this Friday, March 28th to Sunday, April 6th.
There’s a little something for everyone this year, as in most years, but there seems to be a bit more of a trend this year towards gritty urban dramas, psychological thrillers, and life affirming comedies over other genres from years past. Whatever the case, we certainly had a lot to look at and got to as much of it as we could. Here now are reviews of eight of the features from this year’s festival that we had time enough to get around to.
For a full list of features, showtimes, and tickets, please head over to the CineFranco website.
CineFranco 2014
Bright Days Ahead (Dave Voigt)
Hold Back (Andrew Parker)
The Informant (Andrew Parker)
Moroccan Gigolos (Opening Night Gala) (Andrew Parker)
On My Way (Dave Voigt)
The Scar (Andrew Parker)
Vandal (Kirk Haviland)
Wrestling Queens (Kirk Havland)
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