We are the only country in the world to have seen its number of spectators increase in 2024. The good news is that it’s thanks to French cinema with 3 huge successes: Un P’tit truc en plus – which crossed the 10 million admissions barrier!, The Count of Monte Cristo and Love Phew. Between them, they have sold nearly 25 million tickets.
And if we look at the top 10 French films, we are struck by its richness and its variety. It includes works as different as the rural chronicle Vingt Dieux, the animated film The Most Precious of Goods, or the family and social comedy En Fanfare, whose theatrical career is not yet over.
The selection of the 2025 Believe in Cinema Prize
“En fanfare” is also part of the Selection for the 2025 Believe in Cinema Prize of which RCF is a partner. An important prize which rewards each year a feature film released in French cinemas for the human and spiritual values that it illustrates. This prize aims to promote cinema open to the concerns of the world and the spiritual dimension of life.
For this 5th edition, the selection committee selected eight fiction, animated or documentary films, released in theaters in France between December 1, 2023 and November 30, 2024.
They all bring peace, justice or forgiveness, solidarity with the most vulnerable, respect for human dignity or protection of the environment. They were chosen for their adapted, convincing and original creation.
These 8 films are:
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT de Payal Kapadia
RAW DIAMOND by Agathe Riedenger
EN FANNARE by Emmanuel Courcol
FLOW, THE CAT WHO WAS NO LONGER AFRAID OF WATER by Gints Zilbalodis
INCHALLAH UN FILS d’Amjad Al Rasheed
THE NOVEL OF JIM by Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu
THE GHOSTS by Jonathan Millet
RIVERBOOM by Claude Baechtold
Film of the week: Winter in Sokcho
For this week, we propose to resume gently, in a cozy winter atmosphere, with a first Franco-Korean film by Koya Kamura. “Winter in Sokcho” is an adaptation of a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin which marked the critics in 2016 with its maturity and its sensitivity. This is also the case for this very delicate film, about the meeting between two beings who nothing predisposed to cross paths.
Soo-Ha is a young Korean who lives between sea and mountains, in the small seaside town of Sokcho.. She works in a modest guesthouse and regularly visits her mother, a fish seller in the market. She also has a boyfriend who dreams of leaving for Seoul.
One day a somewhat enigmatic French guest arrives at the inn. His name is Yan, he is a designer looking for inspiration. Soo-Ha, born to an unknown French father, will seek to establish a relationship with this man.
The question of parentage
This somewhat equivocal relationship will transform for her into a real quest for identity.. The film very subtly poses the questions of filiation and uprooting linked to Soo-Ha’s dual culture. She learned the French language and cuisine to invent links with this ghost father. When Yan refuses to taste his beef bourguignon, we realize all the suffering of lack and the young woman’s feeling of abandonment.
What is beautiful in the film is how their relationship will gradually develop and allow speech to be freed, particularly between Soo-ha and her mother. Nothing is emphasized or over-explained. Everything goes through the staging, the framing and the chromatic palette of the image, a gradient of melancholy gray-blue, crossed by the foamy white of the snow and the foam of the waves. An in-between which also echoes this country divided by war.
A formally very accomplished first film, with Roshdy Zem and the revelation Bella Kim in the role of Soo-Ha. It is called Winter in Sok-Cho by Franco-Japanese Koya Kamura.
And we are impatiently waiting to know the 2025 winning film of the Croire au cinéma prize. When will it be revealed?
See you next Wednesday, January 29!
