Collegiate Times

This is the fourth year that Virginia Tech has participated in the Tournee Festival, a program sponsored by the French-American Cultural Exchange to bring French films to colleges and universities across the United States.

Janell Watson, an associate professor of French, has been the principle organizer of Tech's festival. Watson has raised funds from various sources including academic departments, the office of Multicultural Affairs, and the provost's Women and Minority Artists and Scholars Lecture Series grants in order to help make the festival possible. For the past two years, the Cercle Francophone, Tech's student-organized French club, has received funding from Student Affairs to help make the festival possible.

Tech is eligible for only one more year of funding from the Tournees Program and will need additional financial support if the festival is to continue.

The films are chosen for this festival with the intention of directly appealing to students. They represent not only France but also a number of French-speaking countries, especially those in Africa and the Caribbean. Films are also chosen for their diverse points of view, or for their ability to address contemporary social issues. Some of the films are big-budget mainstream productions, while others are smaller, independent films.

 "When the school brings that kind of diversity to Blacksburg in the form of foreign art, I think that that is something interesting and it makes it seem like Blacksburg is not just a provincial college town," said freshman HNTM major Amanda Gurley.

Students who had been to see the film festival generally expressed that they were pleased to have the opportunity to see something that differed from their average movie experience.  

"It's interesting to be able to see these types of movies. I liked the fact that they cover very particular parts of your people's daily lives," said junior engineering major David Steinburg after seeing "L'Orgine de la Tendresse" and Other Tales, a program of short films.

 Freshman mathematics major James Burns commented on the same program and said that the films impressed him.

 "I thought that they were each entertaining in some way, that they were so different was something that always held my attention," Burns said.

Other audience members, however, were not as impressed with some of the films' composition. Tatiana MacMartin, a freshman music major who understands French fluently and has been to French film festivals in the past, said of the film "L'intouchable" that it "hardly held my attention" and that "the film lacked any substantial plot".

Watson has also expressed the educational value of the festival to students pursuing careers in all areas.

"Internationalizing the curriculum has long been a goal of Virginia Tech, and I think that the festival helps by exposing people to other ways of making movies, and to settings outside of the United States," Watson said. "Hearing a foreign language, even with subtitles, also reinforces the reality that not everyone on the planet speaks English. We live in a global world, and it is important to realize that there are many perspectives from which to understand it."

"Une vieille maitresse" will play at the Lyric on Saturday at 3 p.m. Admission is free and the film will be subtitled.