French Film Festival UK: 2025 Programme

Is this a banner year for French cinema? A quick scan of the brochure for this year’s French Film Festival UK suggests the answer is a resounding yes! The lineup is bursting at the seams with some of the buzziest titles from this year's international film festival circuit and includes work from legendary French directors as well as plenty of exciting new filmmakers to discover. 

Among those luminaries are the mercurial François Ozon, who’s back with his take on Albert Camus’ enigmatic 1942 novel The Stranger; Julia Ducournau, who delivers an allegorical body horror with Alpha; and The Spanish Apartment trilogy creator Cédric Klapisch, with his reportedly stunning period drama Colours of Time. Another must-see is Nouvelle Vague, American indie legend Richard Linklater’s cool, monochrome drama centred around the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave touchstone Breathless.

Look out too for the coming-of-age film Enzo, the final work from Laurent Cantet, who wrote the film with longtime collaborator Robin Campillo and was due to direct, but died from cancer last year before production began. Campillo stepped in to take over from his old friend, and the results reportedly showcase the best of both filmmakers. 

Another knockout in the programme is Oliver Laxe’s tense (and intense) road movie Sirat, which begins as a story about a father looking for his estranged daughter before morphing into a white-knuckle road trip through the Moroccan desert. There’s also a chance to see the mighty Jodie Foster demonstrate her Francophone skills as an American psychoanalyst living in Paris in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Hitchcockian thriller A Private Life. 

Elsewhere in the programme, there’s a focus marking 130 years since the birth of the great French novelist, playwright and director Marcel Pagnol. The programme includes two films directed by Pagnol (The Baker’s Wife and Topaze), two celebrated Pagnol adaptation (Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources) and the new animated Pagnol biopic A Magnificent Life from the legendary French animator Sylvain Chomet, who credits Pagnol with helping inspire the great filmmakers who emerged during the French New Wave like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Agnès Varde. “They didn’t invent anything,” said Chomet in an interview with FFUK director Richard Mowe. “It was Pagnol who was ground-breaking.”

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The above is just a few of the 62 films screening in this year’s FFFUK programme, which takes place in over 40 different locations across the UK from 6 November to 14 December. For the full programme details, head to frenchfilmfestival.org.uk