June 23: Day 3 of the Festival

24 JUNE 2018

On the festival's third day, while Nathalie Baye headed off to give a master class in Tokyo, five French films were shown at the Aeon Cinema in Yokohama, where the feverish excitement of audiences was palpable: Reinventing Marvin, Everyday Heroes, Memoir of War, Moka, and Revenge were screened to packed theaters, with no one wanting to leave the room when the Q&A session began.

In addition to Finnegan Oldfield, it was a group of French women who came out to meet with Japanese audiences, starting with Anne-Dauphine Julliand, whose film Everyday Heroes will soon be released and has already garnered enormous media buzz, and which was welcomed by long applause after the screening. The enormous show of emotion from the audience even affected the film's Japanese distributor, who left the theater in tears!

Then it was over to Anne Fontaine, who knows Japanese audiences very well, and they clearly have a great appreciation for her, even if she likes to throw in the odd acidic comment from time to time to set them off balance! Audiences also enjoyed meeting Finnegan Oldfield, who was in Japan for the first time.

A little later on, Mélanie Thierry signed autographs decked out in a large cap after speaking about Marguerite Duras during the Q&A session.

Nathalie Baye, for her part, was doubly involved in the proceedings, with the screening of Moka followed by that of Thomas, a short film directed by her daughter Laura Smet. The queue of people awaiting autographs stretched all the way to the end of the commercial center where the session had been set up, but the French actress diligently signed all of the posters, books, and photographs that enthusiastic fans held out to her, and received a mountain of gifts in return. Nathalie Baye made a quick trip in the afternoon to Tokyo to lead a master class at the Waseda University for 300 film students, in which she spoke at length about her work, notably about her habit of reading the screenplays she receives aloud with another person, as well as the "difficult scenes" she has played in. "What's difficult," she said, "is to do things you don't like doing, but on a film set I don't think there's role I don't like to play." She also discussed her experiences working with Truffaut, Godard, Goretta, and Frédéric Fonteyne.

Finally, the day ended with a screening of Revenge by Coralie Fargeat, in the presence of the director as well as the mayor of Yokohama, Fumiko Hayashi, who was also present at the opening ceremony and the screening of Moka. The mayor came along for her own enjoyment, putting in a very low-key appearance—a first-class movie enthusiast!