Movie screening: French culture is best learnt through cinema

Demand for French high in Lahore, Faisalabad: Alliance de Francaise director.

LAHORE:

Cinema is central to life in France and is, therefore, a suitable tool for non-French people to learn about the country’s culture, Alliance de Francaise director Dominique Scobry said on Tuesday. 

He was speaking to The Express Tribune after the screening of The Artist, a French romantic comedy that won five Oscar awards this year. The audience consisted of current and former students of French language courses organised by the cultural centre.

Scobry said unlike Hollywood and Bollywood where movie-making was largely commercial, French still took their cinema as an art form.

The Artist is the third movie the Lahore Alliance has screened this year. The movie is set in early 1900s which, Scobry said was the golden age of French cinema. It narrates the story of a silent movie star in Hollywood who is struggling to cope with the rising popularity of talkies.

The centre is careful about the selection of movies. The director said comedy was the popular genre because a wider audience could relate to it. He said movies with serious content had yet to find a significant viewership in Lahore.

French language education, however, remains in demand. Scobry estimated the number of students in Lahore and Faisalabad centres of the Alliance de Francaise to be over 4,500. Most of these enroll in French language courses to improve their prospects of immigration to Quebec (Canada), and lately to Belgium. Both countries require immigrants to be well-versed in French.

The Alliance director is more enthusiastic about the minority that enroll in these courses for ‘the love of French language and culture’. A number of students have cleared C2 level, the highest level of accomplishment a non-native speaker can attain in French (The levels go: A, B, C, C1 and then C2). He said some of these students would go on to teach French in universities and institutes in Pakistan and play a critical role in bringing people of the two countries closer.

French connection: The general who rests in Anarkali

France never colonised the Sub-Continent but it shares some history with the region, Punjab in particular. General Allard, a French soldier, served in Ranjeet Singh’s army and helped train his troops.

The general and his daughter Mary Charlotte spent their lives in Lahore, and were buried after their deaths in Anarkali.

The Alliance is holding a discussion on General Allard and his Mary Charlotte’s life in the province next week as part of a week-long celebration of French language and culture.

The events to be held at Lahore University of Management Sciences will include an exhibition of French-Pakistani artist Ijaz Malik on Monday, a session about the life and works of French diplomat and poet Saint John Perse on Tuesday, French and Pakistani ambassadors’ talk on diplomatic relations between the two countries on Wednesday and a piano concert on Thursday.

The week will conclude with the session on the life of the French general on Friday.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2012.