In a country where cinema often functions as national conversation, the French have a way of turning personal grief into shared reckoning. That quality is nowhere more vivid than in this year's Alliance Française French Film Festival, now in its 37th edition and screening across 18 Australian cities through to late April. After drawing nearly 199,000 attendees in 2025, the festival arrives bigger than ever, with 38 films and more than 6,000 screenings lined up at Palace Cinemas venues nationwide. Four titles in particular have made waves on the international circuit and deserve the attention of any serious filmgoer.
The most emotionally loaded of the four is Enzo, and its backstory is inseparable from its texture. The film was conceived and co-written by Laurent Cantet, whose The Class won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2008. Cantet died of cancer in April 2024, just as production was about to begin. His longtime collaborator Robin Campillo, best known for his acclaimed 2017 AIDS-era drama BPM, stepped in to direct. The opening credits reflect the unusual circumstances with unusual honesty, billing it as "a film by Laurent Cantet" directed by Robin Campillo. The result is a coming-of-age portrait of a privileged teenager who abandons his family's expectations to take up a masonry apprenticeship, finding himself hopelessly outclassed with a trowel but drawn, with an intensity he cannot quite name, to a Ukrainian co-worker whose life carries the weight of exile and conflict. Campillo has described the adolescent pull at the film's centre as a desire "haunted with a lot of elements" — part yearning, part fantasy, all of it rooted in the body. The film premiered at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight in May 2025 to warm critical reception.
If Enzo is intimate in scale, Dominik Moll's Case 137 (Dossier 137) operates at the level of civic conscience. A police procedural built around an internal investigation into brutality during France's Yellow Vest protests, it anchors its procedural rigour in a superb central performance by Léa Drucker as the investigating officer. The case involves a family from a provincial town who travelled to Paris to protest the closure of their local bus service, only to have their teenage son shot in the head by a police officer and left with permanent brain damage. His best friend, entirely innocent, spent six months in prison because no one in court would listen. Moll has spoken candidly about his own initial scepticism toward the Yellow Vests, admitting he initially accepted the media framing of protesters as extremists before digging deeper. The fractures the movement exposed, he argues, never healed and remain largely unaddressed. For Australian audiences, the film's questions about institutional accountability and the gap between official narratives and lived experience are hardly foreign.
No film in this year's programme generated more controversy than Julia Ducournau's Alpha, which competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 2025. Ducournau won that prize four years earlier with Titane, and her follow-up is ambitious in ways that divided critics sharply. Set in the 1980s and 1990s, the film follows 13-year-old Alpha, who fears she has contracted a fictional virus that turns the infected into crumbling ceramic statues after a class bully forces a tattoo on her. The disease is widely read as an allegory for HIV/AIDS, drawing on Ducournau's memories of the epidemic and her own family's experience as immigrants. Her junkie uncle Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, who reportedly lost 20 kilograms for the role, yearns for death; her mother, a doctor overwhelmed by the pandemic-like chaos surrounding her hospital, clings to a compulsive need to care for everyone around her. On Rotten Tomatoes, 57 per cent of critics gave the film positive reviews, with the site's consensus citing "strong performances" but also "unwieldy structure." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it one star. Others found it searing and deeply personal. The division is itself revealing: Ducournau makes films that refuse to be easily processed.
The quietest of the four, and arguably the most assured, is Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister (La Petite Dernière). Adapted from Fatima Daas's autofiction, it follows Fatima, the youngest daughter of a devout Algerian Muslim family in France, as she forms a relationship with a Korean nurse and tries to find a way to hold her faith and her desires together rather than choose between them. Lead actress Nadia Melliti spent considerable time with the author preparing for the role, and the result is a performance of fresh, unforced naturalism. The film avoids the familiar structure of a coming-out narrative; what interests Herzi is not revelation but negotiation, the daily effort of living honestly within layered loyalties. In a year when identity politics in cinema can feel both exhausted and over-determined, that restraint is itself a kind of statement.
Taken together, the four films point to something that the Alliance Française festival has always done well: holding space for cinema that is genuinely interested in how people live, what they owe each other, and what institutions fail to protect. The festival runs in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane until 8 April, with other cities continuing to late April. Tickets and full programme details are available at affrenchfilmfestival.org. For Australian audiences accustomed to the commercial pressures that shape local film releases, the festival remains one of the few reliable windows onto a European cinema that still believes the personal and the political belong in the same frame.