For 10 days in early March, Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater will become a moving embassy—one where contemporary French cinema arrives in force, not as a single “scene,” but as a complete cross-section of what’s firing right now. The thirty-first edition of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” will run March 5–15 with a 22-film lineup stacked with New York, U.S., and North American premieres, plus post-screening conversations with filmmakers and guests.
The Playlist is exclusively debuting the festival’s new trailer—a quick-hit invitation into that mix of big-name auteurs and emerging voices, cut like a promise: come for the headline premieres, stay for the discoveries and the arguments after the lights come up.
Opening night will belong to “The Stranger,” François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ landmark novel, screening as a New York premiere with Ozon and Rebecca Marder set to appear in person. On the other end of the run, Julia Ducournau will close the showcase with “Alpha,” followed by a Q&A—one of several filmmaker appearances that will turn select screenings into something closer to an event than a stop on a calendar.
Unifrance executive director Daniela Elstner framed the opening-night selection as both a gesture and a statement of purpose: “It is such an honor to open the new edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with The Stranger, the adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic French novel, in the presence of director François Ozon and actress Rebecca Marder. This remarkable film, along with this year’s selection, is a powerful testament to the diversity and creativity of French cinema today.”
Elstner also positioned the series as a long-running exchange point between audiences and artists: “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema continues to serve as a cultural bridge between France and the United States, bringing filmmakers and audiences together through a shared love of cinema. At a time of global uncertainty, we are deeply grateful for the strong and solid relationship we have built with our partners at Film at Lincoln Center.”
That “bridge” idea is practical here. The series is built around the thing New York audiences don’t always get with imported titles: time in the room with the people who made them. This year’s guest list is expected to include filmmakers and special guests like Oliver Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Valérie Donzelli, Dominik Moll, Claire Simon, Pascal Bonitzer, and more—turning a handful of screenings into living extensions of the films themselves.
Film at Lincoln Center vice president of programming Florence Almozini underlined the curatorial ambition behind that spread: “The thirty-first edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema reflects the ever-impressive vitality and artistic ambition of contemporary filmmaking in France. This year’s lineup brings together acclaimed auteurs such as Olivier Assayas, François Ozon, Claire Simon, Pascal Bonitzer, and many exciting new filmmakers, including Leyla Bouzid and Pauline Loquès, to name a few. Film at Lincoln Center is proud to continue this long-standing collaboration with Unifrance, presenting the best of new French cinema to New York audiences.”
If you’re building an itinerary, the shape of the program is the point: a high-profile opener in Ozon, a formally fearless late-run jolt in Ducournau, and a slate that moves between political drama, procedural tension, and intimate coming-of-age stories—anchored by premieres and punctuated by conversations that can sharpen, complicate, or reroute entirely the way a film lands.
Watch the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2026 trailer below, exclusively.
Check out the full line-up below.
Opening Night
“The Stranger” / L’Étranger
François Ozon, 2025, France, 124m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After teaming with Benjamin Voisin for the actor’s breakout role in Summer of 85 (Rendez-Vous 2021), festival regular François Ozon reunites with that film’s star and a cast that includes Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud, and Denis Lavant for a bold new envisioning of Albert Camus’s novel. In a part previously played by Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation, Voisin definitively embodies Meursault, the tightly coiled center of a narrative that recounts a murder in Algiers under French colonial rule. While staying faithful to the chilly, fascinating darkness of Camus’s existential classic, Ozon also gives new life to the canonical text, not least by bringing Algeria to the thematic and visual foreground in this adaptation. Shooting in starkly blown-out black-and-white that suggests the oppressive heat of Meursault’s surroundings, Ozon’s sensitive, queer-inflected reading of Camus’s classic rises to the challenge with appropriately enigmatic elegance. Winner of three Lumières Awards, including Best Film and Best Actor. Nominated for four César Awards, including Best Actor (Voisin) and Supporting Actor (Lottin). A Music Box Films release.
Thursday, March 5 at 6:00pm – Intro by François Ozon and Rebecca Marder
Thursday, March 5 at 8:45pm
“Affection Affection”
Maxime Matray, Alexia Walther, 2025, France, 102m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A statue found thrown into a villa’s pool, a mine explosion in the harbor…. As Maxime Matray and Alexia Walther’s playfully enigmatic sophomore feature begins, inexplicable minor disturbances have begun to trouble the calm of a small town on the Côte d’Azur. These isolated events presage more sinister, destabilizing occurances. Matray and Walter focus their narrative around the character of Géraldine (Agathe Bonitzer), who launches her own investigation after her partner and stepdaughter both disappear. Taking adroit advantage of the bracing scenery of the French Riviera, alive with the slight chill of winter, the eccentric yet understated Affection Affection draws viewers into the action via Bonitzer’s character, closely trailing her journey into the tangled motivations of citizens who all have their secrets, while attentively rendering the lesser-seen rhythms and textures of a French resort town during the off-season.
Monday, March 9 at 9:00pm
Saturday, March 14 at 12:15pm – Q&A with Maxime Matray, Alexia Walther
“Alpha”
Julia Ducournau, 2025, France/Belgium, 122m
French and Berber with English subtitles
After winning the Palme d’Or in 2021 with her body horror triumph Titane (NYFF59), the audacious Julia Ducournau returned to Cannes last year with an even more ambitious and unpredictable new film. When teenager Alpha (Mélissa Boros) returns home from a night of partying with a crude new tattoo, her adolescent recklessness sparks the concern of her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani), already anxious about the spread of an eerie epidemic causing otherwise healthy people—including Alpha’s charismatic uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim)—to progressively transform, their bodies seemingly turning to marble. Pushing the boundaries of mainstream French filmmaking once again, Ducournau more than delivers on the mystery of this startling premise. Viewers receptive to her bold, uncompromising vision will be entranced by a haunting, beautifully stylized film that’s as resonant as it is mysterious. A NEON release.
Saturday, March 14 at 8:15pm – Q&A with Julia Ducournau
“At Work” / À pied d’œuvre
Valérie Donzelli, 2025, France, 90m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After burning out on a successful but no-longer-fulfilling photography career, Paul (Bastien Bouillon) decides to return to his first love, fiction. To enable work on a novel, he takes on a series of gig-economy jobs while pursuing an increasingly precarious path, baffling both his ex-wife and his unsupportive parents. The breakout star of Rendez-Vous 2022 selection The Night of the 12th, Bouillon is quietly riveting as an artist in search of spiritual satisfaction no matter what the economic cost. After the intense psychological thriller Just the Two of Us (Rendez-Vous 2024), Valérie Donzelli demonstrates her range and facility with smaller-scaled human drama in her seventh feature as a director, sympathetically following Paul through a series of new challenges and encounters that fuel both his writing and this film’s inquiring spirit. Winner of Best Screenplay at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
Sunday, March 8 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Valérie Donzelli
Friday, March 13 at 4:00pm
“Case 137” / Dossier 137
Dominik Moll, 2025, France, 115m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
December 2018: as the Parisian police force faces an escalating number of civil disturbance complaints during the newly launched populist “yellow-jacket protests,” internal affairs police officer Stéphanie (Léa Drucker, who won the Lumières Award for Best Actress) is assigned to investigate one such case. Facing equal parts hostility from the friends and family of a man badly injured in an incident of police brutality, and skepticism from fellow officers (including her own ex-husband), Stéphanie remains earnestly committed to the pursuit of justice. After winning seven César Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, with his knotty, nuanced investigatory drama The Night of the 12th (Rendez-Vous 2023), Dominik Moll takes an equally balanced look at modern police work and its social context, set against the backdrop of the industrial city of Saint-Dizier (also the setting for this year’s Rendez-Vous selection Meteors). Nominated for eight César Awards, including Best Film, Director, and Actress (Drucker). A Film Movement release.
Friday, March 6 at 1:00pm
Friday, March 13 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Dominik Moll
“Colors of Time” / La Venue de l’avenir
Cédric Klapisch, 2025, France/Belgium, 124m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
One of the most reliably delightful French filmmakers working over the last 30 years, Cédric Klapisch (Rise, Rendez-Vous 2022) returns with another typically effervescent work. As four cousins gather at their family house in Normandy, Klapisch follows both their present-day reunion and their ancestor’s late-19th-century adventures. Arriving in Paris in 1895 to search for her elusive mother, Adèle (Suzanne Lindon) befriends painters and photographers as the city enters the Belle Époque. Inhabiting a world being rapidly transformed by the visions of Impressionist painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Adèle is the endearing anchor of Klapisch’s lavish, entrancing recreation of Paris on the cusp of a new golden era in the arts—and the alternately thrilling and unnerving dawn of a new, modern world. A Distrib Films release. Nominated for César Awards for Best Costumes and Production Design.
Friday, March 13 at 9:00pm
Sunday, March 15 at 12:15pm
“Enzo”
A film by Laurent Cantet, directed by Robin Campillo, 2025, France/Belgium/Italy, 102m
French and Ukrainian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Over 20 years, Robin Campillo collaborated closely with Laurent Cantet on six films, including 2008’s acclaimed Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Class (NYFF48), as both editor and co-writer. When Cantet died from cancer in 2024, Campillo chose to honor his extraordinary legacy of nuanced, up-to-the-minute social realism by filming their final jointly written screenplay. Talented but failing at school, 16-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) feels alienated from his wealthy, well-meaning family (Pierfrancesco Favino and Élodie Bouchez). Seeking to chart his own path, he struggles to gain a foothold as a construction site apprentice, until a burgeoning friendship with migrant Ukrainian laborer Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi) stirs him out of his unmotivated slump. Sensitively depicting a young man’s sexually ambiguous friendship, Campillo (BPM (Beats Per Minute), NYFF55; Red Island, Rendez-Vous 2024) gently steers this film’s depiction of the intimate reverberations of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.
Friday, March 6 at 9:00pm
Sunday, March 15 at 3:00pm
“The Girl in the Snow” / L’Engloutie
Louise Hémon, 2025, France, 98m
French and Occitan with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After arriving to work in a remote Alpine village, idealistic young teacher Aimée (the luminous Galatéa Bellugi) quickly butts up against the archaic superstitions and prejudices of its geographically and culturally isolated residents. As winter’s harsh conditions endanger the town, the villagers turn against the newcomer in their midst, blaming her for every misfortune that befalls them. Following up a series of acclaimed documentaries, Louise Hémon has constructed her first narrative feature around accounts from generations of teachers in her own family, while taking full advantage of the forbidding, spectacular scenery of her mountain setting (cinematographer Marine Atlan earned a César Award nomination). Beyond the film’s ambitious scope and bold style, the prejudices of rural France at the turn of the last century are represented in ways that are startlingly, grimly resonant with this century’s rise of reactionary sentiment worldwide.
Friday, March 6 at 3:30pm
Thursday, March 12 at 6:00pm
“The Great Arch” / L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche
Stéphane Demoustier, 2025, France/Italy/Denmark, 104m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In 1983, Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, whose only completed work consisted of four churches and his own house, won a competition to design the Grande Arche, a proposed new Paris landmark that would forever alter the iconic street-view of the Arc de Triomphe. Stéphane Demoustier’s deeply researched, procedurally immersive drama tells the true story of von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang, The Square), who personally won the favor of president François Mitterrand, only to find this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity imperiled in the face of daunting obstacles: endless struggles over the project’s budget, squabbles for control, and his own lack of experience. The all-star cast also includes Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall), Sidse Babett Knudsen (The Duke of Burgundy), and Quebecois writer-director-actor Xavier Dolan (Mommy), performers who breathe life into a meticulously reconstructed period piece. Nominated for eight César Awards, including Best Director, Actor (Bang), and Supporting Actor (Arlaud, Dolan, and Michel Fau). A Cohen Media Group release.
Sunday, March 8 at 12:15pm – Q&A with Stéphane Demoustier
Tuesday, March 10 at 8:30pm
