French Film Festival in Macedonia marks 10th anniversary


The 10th French Film Festival kicks off Wednesday (June 14) with the screening of Django, a 2017 French drama film about the life of jazz musician Django Reinhardt, which opened this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The annual festival of French cinema in Macedonia, organized by the Skopje-based French Institute, will take place in 10 cities across the country so as to observe the jubilee.

In the past decade, nearly 100 award-winning films have been screened at the festival that has also attracted over 60 filmmakers from France to come to visit Macedonia and meet with cinema-lovers, according to Isabelle Marchi-Barbaux, head of the French Institute-Skopje.

“The French Film Festival is upholding its reputation of an engaged festival, an open festival, which is in a way a reflection of modern times. The programme we have compiled is open for the wider audience – there are many successful films, everything that is considered the strength of French cinema today,” Marchi-Barbaux told a news conference on Tuesday.

She said that a series of professional meetings had taken place as part of the festival that had resulted in cooperation between the film industries of France and Macedonia.