Just a few miles from Lafayette, Louisiana, six musicians are putting their all into passing down the heritage of the French language and Cajun music. Their band, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, was formed in 1990 by brothers Louis and Andre Michot, and received a 2018 Grammy Award for Best Regional Roots Music Album. Director Bruno Doria has made a "rockumentary"...
Florian Zeller, 39, is the French writer with the most works adapted for the stage in the United States. The Mother is the first instalment of a familial trilogy and is currently playing at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan, starring Isabelle Huppert. Written in 2010, the play portrays the life of a woman gripped by loneliness after her children...
[Partner Article] A barge, a region famous for its wines, and one passion: to travel. Since 2015, Edward Anderson and Cindy Unvericht have been offering unique high-end cruises down the Saône and Burgundy canals. An itinerary crafted for those who love French culture takes guests from the hospices of Beaune to the historic Dijon market. "Americans only know Paris, the...
A young French history and geography buff is undertaking a project to map and signpost the 5,000 miles of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824-1825 tour across America. His work has already received the support of Emmanuel Macron and the White House, and his initiative is being put before the New Hampshire Senate this Thursday. Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette,...
Co-produced by Robert Redford and screened at the Sundance festival, The Mustang, in U.S. theaters on Friday, is the first film by young French filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. It tells the story of a convict in an isolated Nevada prison tasked with taming a wild horse. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s favorite movie is Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, which she sees as a...
Lucky Luke is the main character in a Francophone comic-book series, but is all but unknown in the United States where the market is dominated by superheroes from the Marvel franchise. For the first time ever, in Lucky Luke, a Cowboy in Paris published in French and English, the sheriff has left the American West to visit France during the Belle...
Vermont and New Hampshire are developing the use of French to attract tourists from Quebec just over the American border. A strategy for economic and linguistic development that is starting to pay dividends. In Burlington, the biggest city in Vermont, even the parking meters are bilingual. At the airport and the marina, in public parks and the rooms of the...
French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is the woman behind more than 3,000 works of art including sketches, prints, jewelry, sculptures in wood, fabric, plaster, and rubber, as well as her monumental spiders. A coffee-table book designed in the style of a glossary has been published by Rizzoli to commemorate the career of the woman known as the “lioness of contemporary art.”...
From the first days of January and Mardi Gras, held on March 5 this year, Louisiana celebrates a French tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages — the carnival. The line-up includes floats and bead necklaces in New Orleans, and masked horse riders and Cajun songs in the countryside. This is the world’s biggest show enjoyed for free every...
Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz star in the new film by Neil Jordan, released in U.S. theaters this Friday. The film tells the story of an encounter that spirals out of control. Two years after Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, which was nominated for two Oscars, Isabelle Huppert is back in Greta, the new film from Neil Jordan (Interview with a Vampire, Byzantium,...
On March 2, 1969, the Concorde took off from Toulouse airport for its first flight. Fifty years later, the supersonic plane has been honored in a coffee table book by American designer Lawrence Azerrad. The work features 200 pieces from the author’s collection of postcards, brochures, matchbooks, and other Concorde products. The Concorde plane could cross the Atlantic in three and...
The first major retrospective of fashion designer Thierry Mugler's work, opening on March 2 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, will reveal his ready-to-wear and haute couture creations. "Paris chic by way of Planet Krypton" is how Vogue once described Thierry Mugler’s aesthetic. Thierry-Maxime Loriot, curator of the retrospective Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, calls the style “a kind of futurist...
Did you know that Emmanuel Macron's presidential portrait is almost identical to Barack Obama's? On Presidents' Day, let's take a look at two official portraits that broke with tradition. In June 2017, a few weeks after he was elected, French president Emmanuel Macron was photographed with a 3/4 shot in the American style by Soazig de la Moissonnière, his official photographer...
An exhibition opening on February 16 at San Francisco's De Young Museum focuses on the last years, and the last works, of French painter Claude Monet, an icon of Impressionism and a pioneer of abstractionism. Monet has been called “the great anti-depressant,” and it would be hard to dispute the uplifting qual- ity of those luminous scenes so exquisitely rendered...
The latest film by Christophe Honoré, inspired by his own youth, will be released in U.S. theaters on Friday, February 15. Arthur, 20 is a student in the city of Rennes in Brittany during the early 1990s. His life changes when he meets Jacques, a writer who lives in Paris with his son. Over a summer, Arthur and Jacques develop a...
Christofle has specialized in tableware, flatware, and home accessories since 1830, and has successfully reinvigorated the world of silverware long associated with a bourgeois lifestyle. This new image has seduced American clients and the United States has overtaken France as the brand's first market. Anyone who has stepped into a Christofle boutique has surely had quite a surprise, as grandma’s silverware...
On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman became the world’s first Afro-American woman pilot. At a time when no school in America was ready to admit a colored student, she earned her license from Le Crotoy in Northern France. Seen today as a pioneer of emancipation of women and Blacks, Bessie Coleman is a legend in the United States. In 1915,...
The French television show Objectif Monde focuses on a different societal theme once a month by calling on specialists and Francophone journalists from RTBF (Belgium), Radio Canada, RTS (Switzerland), France Télévisions, and TV5MONDE. This investigative news show selects the best reports across a wide range of subjects from American politics to food and from climate change to the #MeToo movement,...
The cane used by the Marquis de La Fayette, 49 Sèvres porcelain vases, a silk wedding dress, and toy soldiers belonging to a ten-year-old boy. These were just a few of the objects gifted to the United States in a convoy of transatlantic solidarity organized after World War II: the French Gratitude Train. Seventy years ago on February 3, 1949,...
He “captured the Gallic spirit” like no other. As part of the release of the book Robert Doisneau, Music and an exhibition about the photographer at the Paris Philharmonic, France-Amérique takes a closer look at Robert Doisneau’s photo reports in the United States. Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville symbolizes the romanticism of Paris during the 1950s. This photo taken...
A documentary aiming to shed light on the Salafist ideology while showing the daily horrors of living under Sharia law in the Sahel region of Africa has caused controversy in France. It was initially banned for anyone under 18, before the age-limit was dropped to under 16s. The polemical movie will be shown in certain cinemas in New York and...
