Whether you are looking to start learning French, brush up on your skills, or take an advanced conversation class, ThinkFrench might be just what you need. The teachers at ThinkFrench are both university professors and native speakers, with over ten years of practice teaching French as a second language. Our classes offer a truly unique learning experience - each 8 week session gives you access to a private blog that has been specifically designed to help you master contemporary French, the kind of French that is being spoken on the streets of Paris today. The first 8 week sessions for levels 1, 2 and 3 are starting in early September. A few spots remain open at the moment. 
Please visit our blog for more details : 

http://www.thinkfrenchnyc.blogspot.com/

We look forward to hearing from you. À très bientôt.

The ThinkFrench team. 

Alwan for the Arts, New York’s leader in promoting the diverse culture and arts of the Middle East, presents So You Think You Can Dabkeh, a series exploring the traditional and popular line dances of the Levant region of the Middle East. Through participatory and performance events in Manhattan and Brooklyn from September 8 - October 13, 2012, Alwan will celebrate one of the most publicly performed and beloved traditional dances of Arab Americans. The events are open to the public and funded in part by NYSCA.

Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of French artist, Sylvie Vermandel.  The opening reception will be held on Thursday night, September 20, 2012 from 6-8 pm

About the Artist

The oil paintings of French artist Sylvie Vermandel, which the artist refers to as ‘jewel paintings,’ are simultaneously representational and symbolic, reflective of the beautiful natural world that surrounds us as well as the spirituality and light that underscores everything we experience. Rather than using a palette, Vermandel mixes her colors directly on the canvas in thin layers, creating varying contrasts so that the observer is able to attain new perspectives on the painting. She adds an entirely new dimension of light and texture by incorporating such elements as crystals, gold leaf and silver sequins into each piece. What results is a harmony of color, tone and light that celebrates the artist’s great love for Mother Earth and is designed to bring out the positive side of life through sy

17 GIRLS (Cannes Film Festival International’s Critics Week selection), is Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s provocative debut feature focusing on a group of bored teenage girls who all make an irrevocable pact, a story inspired by a true headline-grabbing case which took place in Massachusetts.

When Camille (Louise Grinberg, The Class) accidentally becomes pregnant, she encourages her friends and fellow high-school classmates to follow suit, so they can raise their children collectively, an act at once unexpected and incomprehensible.  It’s only a matter of time, before seventeen girls in the high school are pregnant and the town is thrown into a world of chaos.  Set in the writer-directors’ small, seaside hometown of Lorient in Brittany, 17 GIRLS is a reflection on adolescence, body image, friendship and the perplexing realities of growing up.

Prior to 17 GIRLS, Delphine (also a novelist) and Muriel Coulin (a documentary director) directed five award-winning short films together. Louise Gr

Ticket Info | Membership Offer | Follow the Film Society

André S. Labarthe in person for select screenings on 10/3 and 10/4!

In 1964, film critic and filmmaker André S. Labarthe, together with Janine Bazin, widow of influential film theorist André Bazin, approached the French television channel ORTF about starting a program that would resemble the long, in-depth interviews with film directors that magazines such as Cahiers du cinéma and Positif regularly published. ORTF gave the green light, and Cinéastes de notre temps (Filmmakers of Our Time) was born. Many of the programs were dedicated to older directors, then in retirement or in the final stages of their careers. Instead of TV journalists, Labarthe and Bazin would often ask well-known film directors to make these programs: thus, Jacques Rivette on Jean Renoir, or Jacques Rozier on Jean Vigo.

Cinéastes de notre temps lasted until 1971, when ORTF, for various clear and unclear reasons, decided to terminate production. Over the follo

The painted Narcissus, attributed to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ca 1599, will be the focal image of french artist Francine LeClercq's installation, whereas the erring gaze of Narcissus, the visual echo reverberating between the illusionistic picture plane and the actual gallery setting, the existential reciprocity between the subject and object, form and content, …, are parallel notions and traits that LeClercq uses to investigate the modern context and premise within which a work may be produced, placed and perceived. 

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Narcissus, la nouvelle exposition de l'artiste française Francine LeClercq est à découvrir du 4 au 27 Octobre à la gallerie Soho20 à Chelsea. Cette installation tourne autour de l'oeuvre "Narcissus" attribuée à Caravaggio.

For preview and images, please visit: http://francineleclercq.blogspot.com/

For further information, please contact Jenn Dierdorf at info@soho20gallery.com

Sans soleil 
1982 | France | 100m | 35mm | color | sound 

An eccentric rumination on downtown Toyko, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil is philosophical journalism. Emerging from the compost of newsreels and travelogues, Sans soleil is rooted in the least pretentious, most debased documentary forms. But it’s as though Walter Benjamin or Jorge Luis Borges had scripted The Sky Above, the Mud Below.

Sans soleil has the feel of a testament. It purports to be the footage of a peripatetic cameraman, accompanied by voiceover readings of his letters to the muse. Within this factoid fictional framework, the film plunges headlong into themes of memory and death by proposing itself as the Japanese bridge between a casual shot of three Icelandic children frolicking through a summer field and shots of the same town several years later buried up to its church steeple in molten lava.

At 100 minutes, Sans soleil is too dense to easily assimilate on a single viewing, but, as Marker's surrogate say

anders, Molussien (differently, Molussia) 
2012 | France | 81m | 16mm

A film in nine reels and nine chapters, shown in random order and based on fragments from the novel Günther Anders (English translation of “anders” is “differently”) wrote between 1932 and 1936, The Molussian Catacomb. Prisoners sitting in the cells of an imaginary fascist state, Molussia, transmit stories to one another about the outside world, in the form of series of philosophical fables.

There are 362,880 ways of arranging the nine reels, and so one can reasonably regard every screening as a world premiere.

“Nine reels of unbelievably gorgeous 16mm, eight of which feature allegories drawn from philosopher Günther Anders’s posthumously published 1931 novel The Molussian Catacomb, which exposes the fascism inside capitalism and vice versa. The sequencing of the reels—i.e. the stories and the way certain motifs, aesthetic strategies, and cinematic devices are introduced and worked through—is interchangea

Ionesco’s Theater and the Absurdist Sensibility

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for French Civilization and Culture and the BAM 30^th Next Wave Festival

Location:  Rosenthal Pavilion, NYU Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South

 With playwrights Edward Albee and Israel Horovitz, author Marie-France Ionesco, and Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, director of BAM’s production of Rhinoceros.  Moderator: Tom Bishop, NYU. 

No reservations. Seating is limited. Doors open at 4:30 pm