‘Fjord’, ‘All Of A Sudden’, ‘Minotaur’ & ‘Coward’ Among Titles Set For 30th Edition Of The American French Film Festival In L.A. — SkimNews
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- The American French Film Festival unveiled its 30th-edition lineup running November 3-8 at the DGA Theater Complex in L.A., with 60 films and series — 31 fiction features, 11 series, four documentaries, and 14 short films — and 58 titles competing for festival awards.
- Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, the Cannes Palme d'Or winner starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as evangelical parents investigated for child abuse, is Romania's official Oscar entry and headlines a slate that also includes Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur — the Cannes Grand Prix winner and France's Oscar submission — plus Lucas Dhont's Coward, Belgium's Oscar entry.
- The festival opens with In Waves, an animated feature from French-Vietnamese director Phuong Mai Nguyen adapted from L.A. illustrator AJ Dungo's 2019 cult graphic novel, featuring the voices of Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu.
- Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden — his French-language debut and Japan's Academy Award entry — joins Laïla Marrakchi's Strawberries (Morocco's Oscar entry) and Stephane Brizé's Venice-premiered A Little Good Soldier as further highlights.
- Closing night film The American Dream, a comedy-drama biopic by Anthony Marciano, dramatizes the real story of French NBA agents Bouna Ndiaye and Jérémy Medjana, who represented Victor Wembanyama, Rudy Gobert, and Nicolas Batum.
- Deputy director Anouchka van Riel framed the program as 'a cinema of resistance' — flagging films confronting corporate machines, patriarchal courtrooms, online mobs, and exploitative labor — and asked, 'At a time when intelligence is becoming artificial, what remains human?'
Why it matters: Founded in 1997 by the Franco-American Cultural Fund and now the second-oldest festival in Los Angeles, the 30th-anniversary lineup concentrates five international Oscar submissions (France, Romania, Belgium, Morocco, Japan) and both top Cannes prizes (Palme d'Or and Grand Prix) into a single six-day window, reinforcing TAFFF's role as a key Oscar-season launchpad with the unusually heavy concentration of awards-season assets.
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