Two events will soon shine the spotlight on Maurice Pialat in the USA and in Canada : a retrospective held at the MOMI (Museum of the Moving Image) in New York from October 16 through November 1, 2015; and "Love Exists: The Films of Maurice Pialat" at the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto from October 22 through December 5, held in the presence of Sylvie Pialat.
Sylvie Pialat, a prolific producer who has been honored on many occasions in France this year, and who collaborated on numerous films by the late Maurice Pialat, will be in New York, then Toronto, to participate in this double retrospective event. She will present a selection of films by the celebrated director, including Naked Childhood and Loulou, as well as films she has made as a producer.
Sylvie Pialat is credited with co-writing, along with Maurice Pialat, Police, Under the Sun of Satan, and Le Garçu, but she is better known nowadays as the producer at the helm of the production company Les films du Worso after gaining international recognition for the hit films Stranger by the Lake and Timbuktu ($1,089 million at the North American box office). With the release of Le Trésor by Corneliu Porumboiu, The White Knights by Joachim Lafosse, Valley of Love by Guillaume Nicloux, and Evolution by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2015 has seen Sylvie Pialat join the short-list of the most prominent French producers on the international circuit, whose films feature strongly in theaters around the world and at leading international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto.
The College of Staten Island, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY), will welcome Sylvie Pialat on October 19 to lead a special master class preceded by a screening of Timbuktu, a film that took Les films du Worso and their producer Pialat to the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and the Highland Center in January 2015 as nominees for last year's Oscar in the Best Foreign-Language Film category.
On October 20, Sylvie Pialat will lead another master class, this time at Purchase College (University of New York).
The retrospective will travel to Toronto (TIFF Cinematheque) on October 22. Sylvie Pialat will be present at this leg of the event to present Naked Childhood and Under the Sun of Satan, as well as Valley of Love, a film by Guillaume Nicloux that was in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival and was shot on location in Death Valley.
The retrospective of films by Maurice Pialat will also be presented at a later date at the Harvard Film Archives and the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College.
These events are organized in collaboration with the Cultural Services Department of the French Embassy in New York, with support from the Institut Français, and, of course, the MOMI and the TIFF Cinematheque.
Visit the page on the MOMI (Museum of the Moving Image) website and the dedicated page on the TIFF Cinematheque website.
