The Cultural Services of the French Embassy is pleased to announce a selection of French cultural events that will be presented in Washington, DC and its consular district this month.

This gripping first feature by Hamé and Ekoué, prominent rappers from French rap group La Rumeur, is a Paris-by-night tour that stays far away from the glimmer of the Eiffel Tower, offering instead an insider’s portrait of a vibrant, quickly gentrifying urban neighborhood, with its African hairdressers, Algerian groceries, tourists, neon sex shops, and every street scam known to man. But beneath the kinetic action of Pigalle and the film’s groovy soundtrack, something deeper surfaces: a profound reflection on the constant hardships and disappointments faced by two generations of Algerian immigrants in France.

By Jean-Luc Godard. Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) seems like a typical criminal, making a living stealing and reselling cars. One day, a policeman forces him to pull over, and in a panic, Poiccard shoots and kills the officer. The act triggers a police chase as Poiccard attempts to escape from his crime. The pursuit may have been short-lived were it not for Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an aspiring journalist who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs Élysées …

Championed by the younger filmmakers of the French New Wave of the 1960s, the films of Jacques Becker (1906 – 1960) constitute some of the most engaging cinema of postwar Europe. With compassion, wit, and a gift for working with actors, he became a perceptive chronicler of life in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s. In films such as Rendez-vous de juillet, he also demonstrated a fondness for Hollywood cinema and American jazz. This series screens eight of Becker’s films, several of which have recently been restored and theatrically re-released.

In this Laurent Tirard film set in Napoleonic-era France, the charming Captain Neuville (Academy Award winner Jean Dujardin) is set to marry the naïve Pauline. When the war commences, Neuville must depart for battle. But after not hearing from her fiancée in months, Pauline becomes ill with worry. When Neuville returns unexpectedly, Pauline’s sister Elizabeth (Mélanie Laurent) is determined to expose the real Neuville…

French Maestro Julien Benichou and the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra will be joined by Stefan Jackiw who will be playing the timeless Beethoven Violin Concerto. Following the concerto will be Dvorak’s lush Symphony No. 7 and complemented along with a piece by one of France’s foremost living composers, Regis Campo, who comes especially to present his masterpieceOverture in the Shape of Stars.

Camille Corot is best known as the great master of landscape painting in the 19th century who bridged the French neoclassical tradition with the impressionist movement of the 1870s. His figure paintings constitute a much smaller, less well-known portion of his oeuvre, but are arguably of equal importance to the history of art, in particular for the founders of modernist painting such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Corot’s women read, dream, and gaze, conveying a mysterious sense of inner life.

Modern artists on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn to the opposite shore by what seemed like magnetic attraction—mostly Americans traveling to France, but also a few key Parisians who made their way to New York. Art historian and curator Kenneth E. Silver of New York University delivers a lecture on the beautiful, innovative, and sometimes surprising art that resulted from this cultural back-and-forth.

Whet your appetite with manger, a delectable work by French choreographer Boris Charmatz (Levée des conflits, 2016 Fringe Festival) that implores audiences to examine the nature of eating, of digesting information, of consuming. Charmatz subjects dance to formal constraints which redefine its possibilities. Inmanger (French for “to eat”), Charmatz sets bodies in motion not with the eyes, or with the limbs, but with the mouth: dancers chew through reams of paper, taste, swallow, sing, eat. manger is a swallowed reality, a slow digestion of the world.

Jérémie Royer is an illustrator and designer. Raised in Nice, he studied comic book art and illustration at the École supérieure des arts Saint-Luc in Brussels and is now based in Paris. Royer is co-authorof On the Wings of the World (Nobrow Press), a graphic novel biography of French-born ornithologist John James Audubon. He will discuss his work at Takoma Park Maryland Library and Small Press Expo, America's Premiere Independant Cartooning and Comic Arts Festival.

International development expert Serge Michailof will present his latest book Africanistan, Development or Jihad. Building on the example of the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants where conflict has become ubiquitous, Serge Michailof will discuss whether the same obstacles that plagued Afghanistan are present in the Sahel. Are we headed to a “Sahelistan” first step to an Africanistan? This event will be in French.

Join Carole Geneix for a discussion of her dectective novel, La mille et deuxième nuit. A love letter to the Belle Epoque and the Ballets Russes, La mille et deuxième nuit is Geneix's literacy debut. This fanciful and nostalgic story takes place in a Europe which succumbing to its demons - nationalism and antisemitism - before it descends into war.This event will be in French.

When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nationoffers a fresh perspective on America's tumultuous first years as a young nation, when the Atlantic world's first republican experiment was put to the test. Historian François Furstenberg explores the country's formative period from the viewpoint of five distinguished Frenchmen who took refuge in America after leaving their homes and families in France. Through their stories, we see some of the most famous events of early American history in a new light.

The publication of Edouard Louis’s The End of Eddy (2014) was a disruptive moment in French academic and literary circles. More than a coming-of-age novel, Louis’s book frames the act of writing fiction through a transformative socio-political lens. In this talk, Tristan Cabello explores Louis’s intersectional representation of sexuality, his redefinition of fiction writing, and the political discussion that emerges from his literary work.

The threat posed by the manipulation of information has sparked growing awareness and concern in both Europe and the U.S. What lessons can be derived from successful anti-disinformation campaigns?  How can we address the fake news and disinformation campaigns while preserving our freedom of speech? How can we make democratic societies and the media more resilient against disinformation? How can transatlantic cooperation be strengthened to combat the manipulation of information? Should social media be regulated?