IN WASHINGTON, DC

June 19 > July 19, 2009

The National Gallery of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and La Maison Française
join forces to pay tribute to the "Festival des 3 Continents", an annual celebration of Asian, African, and Latin
American cinema held in the French city of Nantes since 1979.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of "Le Festival des 3 Continents", our partnership brings to Washingtonian
audiences 20 exceptional screenings representing the very best of the films shown in Nantes since the
beginning of the festival. Many of these masterpieces will be seen for the first time in Washington, D.C.

A New History of Cinema

By Jean-Philippe Tessé, Programmer

In November 2008, the FESTIVAL DES 3 CONTINENTS in Nantes, France, celebrated its 30th birthday. Thirty years
means three decades and hundreds of films screened for a loyal, curious and insatiable audience. It means
dozens of filmmakers visiting the coastal town that Jacques Demy called home. It also refers to a date: 1979,
when two brothers and film aficionados, Alain and Philippe Jalladeau, decided to open a window onto three
continents-Asia, Africa and Latin America-in order to write a new history of the cinema, one that stood apart
from the dominant canons of North America and Europe. There had been an initial opening toward the cinema
of the South a decade earlier, in the late 1960s, when there was sudden interest in films dealing with what was
then called "Third-Worldism." The FESTIVAL DES 3 CONTINENTS picked up the torch, but without that Western habit
of viewing from on high what others are doing down below. Choosing films from Asia, Africa and Latin America
was of course a political gesture, but the politics were that of cinema itself-not the kind of cinema that's a
simple ethnological curiosity but rather the kind that celebrates the universality of an art that uses the same
tools from Gabon to Chile, Malaysia to Afghanistan: a camera, actors and the desire to express oneself.

Thus in 1979 the first edition of the festival awarded a Montgolfière d'Or to Baara by Souleymane Cissé, a
Malian director who was little known at the time. Subsequently, under the leadership of the Jalladeau brothers,
working with Serge Daney and an increasingly dense network of friends and colleagues worldwide, the festival
would acquaint Westerners with whole chapters of the history of film through major retrospectives such as
those devoted to Indian cinema or that of the Philippines-a chance to discover such major auteurs as Ritwak
Ghatak and Lino Brocka, among a thousand others, who had been left out of the "official" story. Such
examples earned the festival a reputation for identifying unrivaled new talents. No other festival can claim so
many discoveries: Wong Kar-wai from Hong Kong, the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, the Chinese Jia Zhang-ke,
the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, to name but a few of the most celebrated. All received
their first Western exposure in Nantes. And they are but the standard-bearers for a whole army of creators
from the South, filmmakers who, in projecting their images along the banks of the Loire, were revealed to the
entire world. There are too many of them to mention here.

Too many indeed. From this vast number we have selected a few names, a few films, spanning the Festival's
30 years. The Washington program is taking place at three venues: the Maison Française, the National
Gallery, and the Freer Gallery. We wanted it to be as geographically and historically diverse as possible to
showcase the wide range of visions that have come to Nantes. Thus we find films from the festival's early
days, such as They Don't Wear Black Tie by the Brazilian Leon Hirszman (Montgolfière d'Or, 1981), and
others that are more recent, such as Una Semana Solos by the young Argentinean filmmaker Celina Murga.
Still others were part of retrospectives, including the legendary Antonio das Mortes by Glauber Rocha;
Alexandrie, Encore et Toujours, by Youssef Chahine, the prince of Egyptian cinema; and the diptych Le Franc
/ The Little Girl who Sold the Sun by Djibril Diop Mambéty of Senegal.

Then there are the new visions, the first salvos from filmmakers who would go on to attain great heights: Hou
Hsiao-hsien's A Summer at Grandpa's (Montgolfière d'Or 1985); Chronicle of a Disappearance, the first film by
the Palestinian Elia Suleiman; and Jia Khang-ke's Platform (Montgolfière d'Or 2000); not to mention Finzan by
Cheikh Oumar Sissoko of Burkina Faso; Devarim by the Israeli Amos Gitai; Silvia Prieto by the Argentinean
Martin Reijtman; Wanderers of the Desert by the Tunisian Nacer Khémir; and The Realm of Fortune by the
Mexican Arturo Ripstein.

Finally, this program gave us the opportunity to organize a projection of the incomparable West of the Tracks
by Wang Bing, a monumental nine-hour documentary that is without question one of the most important works
of the new century. It's also a way to highlight the festival's growing interest in documentaries, which now
compete in the official competition alongside fictional films. Acts of Men by the Brazilian Kiko Goifman is
another example. Many of these films sadly lack visibility. All those who discover the extraordinary Water,
Wind, Dust, an early work by Amir Naderi, a fellow traveler of Abbas Kiarostami, before he went into exile in
the United States, will agree: The history of cinema is in constant flux, and the Festival des 3 Continents has
been doing its part to showcase this ongoing renewal for the past 30 years.

To read more:  click here

+ info:
National Gallery of Art
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
La Maison Française