Sunday, August 24, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica
When her parents are killed in an air strike while trying to flee Paris during the German invasion, five-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) ("in a performance that rips the heart out" – New York Times) wanders into the French countryside, where she encounters 11-year-old peasant boy Michel (Georges Poujouly). As they build a special, secret friendship, the adults play their own games of buffoonish peasant feuds. A masterpiece of French post-war cinema with a haunting hit score played by guitar virtuoso Narciso Yepes, the ultimately beautiful, hilarious, and disturbing Forbidden Games won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival — and then became a worldwide art house smash, also winning an Independent Grand Prix at Cannes, the Best Foreign Film Award from the New York Critics Circle, and Clément's second Academy Award® for Best Foreign Film. “No one before René Clément in his 1952 Forbidden Games mingled the grotesque horror of war with the comedy of innocence, and maybe no one has since.” — New York Magazine “A series of harsh contrasts, with on the one side the intuitive, lyric understanding between the two children, and on the other the ludicrous comedy of the quarrelsome, ignorant peasant adults." — Pauline Kael “Clément seems to be observing behavior rather than staging moments — rarely have child actors been this convincingly childlike...Forbidden Games is a heartbreaker...but it's also seeded with hope." — Village Voice “Boldly weaving the cruel, humorous, and unfathomable into Forbidden Games' fairytale-dabbled, traumatized daydream, Clément conjures innocence as few ever have: magical, morbid, and desperately half-aware." — The L Magazine The 4K restoration was produced from the original 35mm negative and the sound negative. The image was scanned in 4K by TransPerfect Media, which carried out the color grading and digital work to erase imperfections present on the original elements. Supervised by the Studiocanal team, Sophie Boyer and Jean-Pierre Boiget. Restoration and digitization with the support of the CNC.