Fifty years ago this fall, from September 10-19, 1963, the first New York Film Festival was held. The cinema world was different in those days. In an era before home video and DVDs, the few venues for film fanatics to see non-mainstream or foreign films were repertory cinemas, college film societies or festivals. The top grossing film that year was Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And although Beatlemania had reached a critical mass in Britain, the band had yet to conqu...

Bringing a feminine approach to the largely-masculine dominated cinematic era of the Nouvelle Vague, Agnes Varda has been a pioneer of French feminist cinema for over 40 years. Cléo de 5 à 7 traces 2 hours in a woman’s life as she travels around Paris anxiously awaiting medical test results. One of the key scenes in the film takes place at Parc Montsouris in the 14th arrondissement, and Jen Wallace headed over there to discover which landmarks featured in the movie can still be f...

By Sophie Nellis   Belmondo and Seberg    The French New Wave – known as la nouvelle vague– was a celebration of youth, Paris and, above all, cinema. Many people don’t know that the term nouvelle vague was first used in 1957 to describe the new generation of French youth, emancipated 18 to 30 year olds who were free-thinking and keen to throw off the legacy of the Second World War. It was only following the success of François Truffaut’s Les...