The fest communicates with schools throughout the year to coordinate the program. “Some wake up at 4 a.m., coming in from Santa Barbara or Victorville,” says van Riel. Students bus into the DGA from far and wide. TAFFF’s deputy director, Anouchka van Riel, who has overseen the fest’s educational component for six years, says “the program is unique and a tremendous amount of work went into it.” With help from the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), the program annually draws students from about 50 to 70 high schools throughout Southern California, from both public and private schools. In addition to TAFFF, this fall ELMA will be supporting festivals including Screamfest, Animation Is Film, Polish Film Festival L.A. “Festivals are run by passionate people who work with very small teams, and oftentimes all this work goes into something and there is no money left for marketing, so no one comes.” Or a festival merely is able to bring out a dwindling coterie of foreign-language film buffs - the “expats and the older cinephiles, but it’s missing the target really.” ELMA steps in to help expand the reach to younger and more mainstream American audiences. “ELMA tries to help festivals go above and beyond,” says Ladreyt, who has a background in business and also worked in foreign affairs as a director of French cultural centers on both sides of the Atlantic. It all started with an idea hatched by the American French Film Festival (TAFFF) founder François Truffart to invite students to share in the Francophone fun, says Pascal Ladreyt, who heads up the foundation European Languages and Movies in America (ELMA), the key sponsor behind the TAFFF’s education initiatives.ĮLMA, a nonprofit that focuses on showcasing European films, acts as a booster to festivals seeking to add an educational component surrounding cultural exchange and young cinema-audience building. Tokyo: Milcho Manchevski On His Competition Film, Artistic Compromise and an Iconic Hip-Hop Video
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