On Saturday September 1st, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy received the 2018 Alice Guy-Blaché Award from the Fort Lee Film Commission.
For the first time in 2018, Films on the Green, the free outdoor French film festival produced annually by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, FACE Foundation and NYC Parks, expanded to Fort Lee, NJ with a screening of Donkey Skin by Jacques Demy, presented in partnership with the Fort Lee Film Commission which preserves and promotes Fort Lee’s film history.
Prior to the screening, at the Jack Alter Fort Lee Community Center, the Film Commission presented the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, represented by Mathieu Fournet, Head of Film, TV and New Media Department and Nathalie Charles, Program Officer, Films on The Green Festival, with the 2018 Alice Guy-Blaché Award, in recognition of a successful collaboration between our festival and the Commission’s Movies and Music Under the Stars series. For the occasion, the French Embassy received also an Official Proclamation from the City of Fort Lee.
Fort Lee, a pre-Hollywood film capital of the United States, has a long history of collaboration with French filmmakers. The birthplace of Universal Pictures in 1912 and the Fox Film Corporation in 1915, Fort Lee was also the home to the early French film studios Solax and Eclair in the early 20th century. The French founder and artistic director of the Solax Studios, Alice Guy-Blaché, known as the first female filmmaker, produced, wrote and directed hundreds of films in Fort Lee.
Below is the video of the ceremony (©Donna Brennan/Fort Lee Film Commission):
The ceremony was followed by live music by Avalon Jazz Band and a free outdoor screening of French musical Donkey Skin, presented in French with English subtitles.
The Municipality of Fort Lee will soon break ground on the Barrymore Film Center, a 250 seat cinema with attached museum and second floor archive. This film center will not only celebrate Fort Lee film history but world cinema history via exhibits, film retrospectives, and screenings of the work of new filmmakers from around the world.