Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966)

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966) / Country: France / Director: Jacques Demy / Length: 126 min / Language: French / Subtitles: English / Entrance: FREE

The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) is a French art film movement that emerged in the late 1950s. The movement was characterized by its rejection of traditional filmmaking conventions in favor of experimentation and a spirit of iconoclasm. New Wave filmmakers explored new approaches to editing, visual style, and narrative, as well as engagement with the social and political upheavals of the era, often making use of irony or exploring existential themes.

On Wednesday, 2 February 2022, at 19:00 we screen Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966), a French musical comedy film written and directed by Jacques Demy. The ensemble cast is headlined by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, and features Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli, George Chakiris, and Grover Dale, along with Danielle Darrieux and Gene Kelly. Michel Legrand composed the score for the film, to Demy's lyrics. The most famous songs from the film are "A Pair of Twins" ("Chanson des Jumelles") and "You Must Believe in Spring" ("Chanson de Maxence"). The dance sequences were choreographed by Norman Maen.

Jacques Demy (1931 – 1990) was a French director, lyricist, and screenwriter. He appeared in the wake of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. His films contain overlapping continuity (i.e., characters cross over from film to film), lush musical scores (typically composed by Michel Legrand) and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave.

All films will be screened in the French language with English subtitles and the entrance is free of charge. Kino ARMATA's public program is supported by Prishtina Municipality and Goethe Institut.