COLCOA 10th Anniversary

By Scott Foundas

COL-COA and I took up residence in this city at more or less the same moment and, I’m happy to report, it’s been a fruitful, if admittedly unlikely decade for us both. Just as a transplant from Tampa, Florida has managed to gain a toehold in the cutthroat world of Los Angeles movie journalism, so a film festival that began as an unprecedented experiment in cultural exchange has become — dare I say it — an institution.

The concept seemed bold from the start: Program a half-dozen or so French feature films (and an equal number of shorts), most of them world or international premieres unattended by any advance publicity in the U.S.; hold the screenings right in the heart of Hollywood; sit back, cross your fingers and hope that an audience shows up. Well, those fingers didn’t stay crossed for very long. For no sooner did COLCOA arrive than it became one of the belles of the Los Angeles movie going ball, drawing a hearty crowd of industry professionals and die-hard movie buffs for whom le cinéma français has long exuded a particular romance. And when I say crowd…well, just take it from someone who attended the festival’s early years strictly as a spectator, religiously queuing up for the annual Saturday-morning ticket pre-sale — I know of what I speak.

Not that this should come as any real surprise. Right from the get-go, COLCOA established its commitment to not one type of French cinema, but rather the whole dazzling spectrum. Here is where the handcrafted animated features of Michel Ocelot have shared the screen with revivals of important work by Chris Marker, Jacques Tati and Jacques Demy; where U.S. audiences were first introduced to the genre-bending films of Eugène Green (who may be the ideal COLCOA filmmaker, in that he is an American who has spent most of his life living and working in France); and where art-house veterans like Claire Denis and Raul Ruiz have regularly rubbed elbows with such committed popular storytellers as Francis Veber and Claude Lelouch (the latter of whom, just last year, used the COLCOA audience to test out an intermediate edit of his most recent film). And elbows do rub, for whenever possible COLCOA has shown films in the presence of their directors and other key members of the creative team. How exactly they manage to cram such a rich program into the space of a mere seven days brings to mind the title of one of the greatest films ever to screen in the festival: Time Regained.

Speaking of which, time has moved on, COLCOA’s program has expanded and become ever more adventurous and I have gone from merely attending the festival to reporting about it in the pages of Variety, the L.A. Weekly and Indiewire.com. But like the very best film festivals, COLCOA has remained above all a gathering place, where cineastes and cinephiles from two continents come together to indulge their shared passion. Indeed, no subtitles are necessary here: The common language is cinema. I could be cynical, I suppose, and say that the experience is akin to the elderly Proust biting into that storied madeleine and finding himself transported back to a bygone era — one when large crowds still came together to see movies on large screens and engage in spirited debates about them afterwards. But then, as long as there is a COLCOA, who is to say that such an era is bygone at all. So, here’s to you COLCOA on your tenth anniversaire. Vive La France! Vive Le Hollywood! Vive Le Cinéma!

Scott Foundas is the film editor and chief film critic for the L.A. Weekly, in addition to which his writing has appeared in Variety, The New York Times and Cahiers du Cinéma. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics and has served on official juries at the Cannes, Sundance and Vancouver film festivals.