World Market
Something for everyone at City of Lights, City of Angels festival
Recently, that mandate has seen the inclusion of several remarkable nonfiction works in the festival program, of which Chantal Briet’s exquisite The General Store (Alimentation Générale) is this year’s discovery. Over the course of four years, Briet filmed the residents of a dilapidated, multiethnic housing project in the Parisian banlieueof Épinay-sur-Seine as they passed through the doors of the neighborhood grocery and through the life of its owner, an Algerian immigrant named Ali who also serves as his customers’ banker, legal adviser and confidant. Épinay, we’re told at the film’s start, was once heralded as the utopian “city of tomorrow,” but the reality of The General Storeis that tomorrow looks an awful lot like today — façades may change, but ordinary people are still living, dying and searching for a sense of community. In Épinay, they find it at the supermarket, where, as with COLCOA itself, there truly is something for everyone.
CITY OF LIGHTS, CITY OF ANGELS | Directors Guild of America | Mon-Sun., April 16-22 | www.colcoa.org
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