Columbia Maison Française

This screening is part the 2026 Francophone Short Films Festival in Harlem that will start at the Maysles Documentary Center on April 24, 2026 and end at the Lyçee français on April 29.

Program 5, Tuesday, April 28, 6:00 pm, Maison Française de Columbia

Comme une spirale (Like a spiral), 2024, Lamia Chrab, 28’, Documentaire, Canada/Québec

A dialogue between Beirut and five women, migrant domestic workers, under the Kafala system. Expressing their belonging to a society in collapse, the women’s voices rise through the film’s grainy images to denounce their stolen freedom with an inalienable thirst for existence. Their memories dance in the rhythm of oppression. Caught within life’s spiral, they lift themselves up to not sink into oblivion.

Toubab, 2025, Marie-Sybille Loutan & Valentine Coral, 11’, Fiction, Switzerland.

Omar and Kevin, two young men from the projects decide to hold up a local grocery store. As they’re making their escape, they steal a car with a baby inside, causing a major disruption to their plans

Zolla, 2025, Victoria Neto, 29’, Fiction, France

Caught between her disillusioned student life and the pressures of being the eldest daughter, Zolla, a twenty-year-old Black woman of Congolese descent, desperately seeks independence. To achieve this, she must confront her mother, who refuses to be abandoned a second time…

Independance Tchatcha,2024. Alexis Zounguere-Sokambi aka Je dessine bien, 3’, Animation, Belgium

Through a series of rapid-fire sketches, *Indépendance Tchatcha* offers an immersion into the daily lives of people of African descent from all walks of life—whether within an African family with a polygamous past, in the offices of a major corporation lacking in “diversity,” or in a romantic relationship rooted in fetishization.

Cœur d’enfants, (Children’s hearts) 2024, Isabelle Kolkol, 9’, Fiction, Guinée

The family life of Loua TÖNWÔN, a 10-year-old girl.

Cairo street, 2025, Addellah Taia, 19’, Documentaire, Egypte.

"January 2007. I’m back in Cairo. For work. You changed your number, Omar. I have to find you. I love you… Abdellah."

SAVE THE DATE

Join us for a talk by Anaïs Maurer: The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists
📅 April 30, 2026
🕡 6:00 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. She shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.

Join us on April 9, 2026 for a screening of Four Daughters (2023) by Kaouther Ben Hania.

This screening will be followed by discussion with Nicole Wallenbrock and Madeleine Dobie

This riveting documentary by two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) uses an audacious formal conceit to tell the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters. Attempting to answer the question of how and why the Tunisian woman’s two eldest were radicalized, Ben Hania reveals a complex history. We watch as the family relives key events in their lives with help from professional actors standing in for the missing girls.

Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the Gotham Awards, and Best Writing at the IDA Documentary Awards, Four Daughters is a compelling portrait of five women and a unique and ambitious work of nonfiction cinema that pushes against the conventional boundaries of the documentary form to explore the nature of memory, rebellion, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.

This screening is made possible by the generous support of Albertine Cinémathèque. Albertine Cinémathèque is part of the French for All initiative by Villa Albertine and Albertine Foundation and is made possible by the support of the Centre National du Cinema et de l’Image Animée (CNC).

Joins us in April for our Spring Lecture Series: From America to France and back again: Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the American Revolution.

📅 April 14, 2026
🕡 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Stacy Schiff - Eugene Sheffer Distinguished Lecture
Le Premier Américain: Benjamin Franklin in France
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

📅 April 22, 2026
🕡 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Laura Auricchio
“As sincere an American as any Frenchman can be” — Lafayette Between Two Worlds
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

SAVE THE DATE ⭐

Join us on April 2, 2026 at 6PM for a panel discussion with Matthew Affron, Ellen McBreen, and Denise Murrell, moderated by Victor Sainsot.

In March 2026, several major exhibitions – at the Grand Palais in Paris and at the Baltimore Museum of Art – renew attention to the work of Henri Matisse. These exhibitions provide an opportunity to reconsider current Matisse scholarship in the United States and to explore the artist’s complex relationship with the American continent.

In early 1930, Matisse crossed the Atlantic and arrived in New York – the first step in a transformative artistic journey that would lead him to the West Coast, to Tahiti, and then to the West Indies. Who were the interlocutors (curators, collectors, models), the stopovers, and the landscapes that shaped his voyage?

To what extent did these American motifs influence his artistic practice both during his travels and upon his return to France? This discussion aims to move beyond the anecdotal dimension of the journey to examine the symbolic and aesthetic significance of Matisse’s transatlantic experience, with particular attention to the Martinican episode, often overlooked in art-historical narratives. Exploring the encounter between Matisse’s Western gaze and a world already marked by circulation, hybridity, and resistance allows us to re-situate his works within an expanded geography of modernity and to reassess the importance of the Interamerican moment in his creative trajectory.

Presentations by:

Matthew Affron on Matisse in Philadelphia

Ellen McBreen on The "Instinctive Geometry" of Tapa Textiles TBC

Denise Murrell: Matisse and Martinique: The Making of an Exhibition

SAVE THE DATE:

Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories

📅 Date: Monday, March 2, 2026
🕡 Time: 6:00 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

A talk by Miranda Spieler, in conversation with Madeleine Dobie and Christy Pichichero.

In Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, miranda Spieler examines the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, and she brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.

Join us for a screening of Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville (1969).

📅 Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026
🕡 Time: 6:30 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

France, The Resistance: an escape from the Gestapo, so sudden and hairsbreadth as to leave the toughest of tough guys gasping with the icy sweat of terror and relief; two brothers remain unaware, to the end, of each other’s clandestine activities; patriots, who, in relentless pursuit of traitors, must steel themselves to the most brutal of face-to-face violence. Gallic icon LinoVentura (Elevator to the Gallows, Classe Tous Risques), aided by compatriots including maitresse of disguise Simone Signoret, goes underground in the face of the German Occupation—but heroism can come at a truly high price.

This screening is made possible by the generous support of Albertine Cinémathèque. Albertine Cinémathèque is part of the French for All initiative by Villa Albertine and Albertine Foundation and is made possible by the support of the Centre National du Cinema et de l’Image Animée (CNC).

Join us on March 11, 2026 for a Panel Discussion with Thomas Dodman, Carol Gluck, Mark Mazower, Emmanuelle Saada, and Joanna Stalnaker.

📅 Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2026
🕡 Time: 6:00 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Les Volontaires tells the extraordinary story and “family romance” of a young man who was raised to be Rousseau’s Emile, and of his philosophe adoptive mother and step sister–future wife, through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the early nineteenth century. Part micro-history, part social biography, this book explores ways and possibilities of writing a fragmentary history in a minor key.

This event will take place in English. It is presented as part of the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series by the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Maison Française.

Join us for We're Alone: Edwidge Danticat in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards, at the Maison Française.

📅 Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2026
🕡 Time: 6:00 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Edwidge Danticat talks with Brent Hayes Edwards about We’re Alone, her recent book of essays that trace a loose arc from her childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, and include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin.

The essays explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience, moving from the personal to the global and back again. Literature and art remain her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs.

We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française, African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).

Join us for a discussion organized by Villa Albertine, the Columbia Maison Française, and the Alliance Program

📅 Date: Wednesday, January 28, 2026
🕡 Time: 6:30 PM
📍 Location: East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

In 2026, The Columbia Maison Française and the Alliance Program will partner with Villa Albertine to launch a new conversation series on ecology. The series will address major topics such as the collapse of ecosystems, the transformation of human-to-nonhuman relationships, the societal and economic impact of global warming, and urban resilience.

The Columbia Climate School joins the Maison Française, Alliance Program and Villa Albertine as a co-sponsor of this event.

Together, the speakers will reflect on the idea of a “New Enlightenment” for the Anthropocene era. As we confront the decline of biodiversity, the discussion will explore emerging forms of interdependence among human, animal, and plant life. We will ask: How might the ways earlier societies and ecosystems co-adapted to climate pressures inform us today? Can we imagine a new social contract that would bring forth a more equitable coexistence between human and nonhuman worlds? How might an expanded sense of “the other” and a heightened awareness of contemporary vulnerabilities be translated into public policy? How can public engagement be designed to turn these concepts from ideals to actions?