Valérie David-McGonnell is Director of the Cork French Film Festival and President of Alliance Française de Cork – the not-for-profit French language and cultural organisation which has been organising the festival for close to four decades. She introduces this year's edition of the CFFF, which runs March 2nd - 8th.
Now in its 37th year, the Cork French Film Festival (CFFF) is the longest-running French film festival in Ireland. It takes place every March during Francophonie Month – a celebration of the diversity of French-language cultures. It has been my pleasure and privilege to lead the CFFF programming team for the past six years, hand-picking a selection that aims to appeal to various audiences and is accessible to everyone as all films are presented with English subtitles.
This year, the festival runs from 2nd to 8th March and includes a wealth of César-nominated features and award-winning shorts, but it is an Oscar winner who will get it underway. Director Régis Wargnier, who won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1993 for Indochine, will be coming to Cork for a special screening of his latest release Redress (La Réparation) followed by a Q&A.
Another Oscar winner gives a remarkable performance in her first French-speaking role when Angelina Jolie stars in Couture, directed by Alice Winocour, while this year's classic film pays tribute to the late Brigitte Bardot through the Academy Award-nominated legal drama, The Truth.
Other highlights of the 2026 programme include the gripping science-fiction feature Dog 51 – set in a dystopian, AI-monitored Paris – and several films based on famous French literary classics, including adaptations of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Éric Besnard’s atmospheric Jean Valjean, an Irish premiere.
The programme also features Case 137, a police crime drama that has eight nominations for the upcoming César Awards and has already netted Léa Drucker the Lumière Award for Best Actress for her role as the lead investigator in an Internal Affairs probe.
Cédric Klapisch’s The Colours of Time, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, follows four distant cousins who inherit a house in beautiful Normandy and retrace the steps of their ancestor.
The festival also features two new animations: Mary Anning, by Swiss director Marcel Barelli, which is based on the real-life fossil hunter, and French animation The Songbirds’ Secret, for younger audiences.
Our selection of Francophone Shorts spotlights Belgian, Luxembourgish, and French productions, and includes the Oscar- and César-nominated Two People Exchanging Saliva.
The main festival concludes on Sunday 8th March, but the school screenings continue in Cork City, Mallow and Midleton until Wednesday 12th March, with the coming-of-age comedy-drama Le Panache, about a stuttering 14-year-old boy overcoming his insecurities through theatre.
We look forward to welcoming cinema lovers of every stripe – from Cork and beyond – to enjoy this rendez-vous with French-language cinema. And we hope that audiences will also join us for the programme of events we have planned for the upcoming Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU, when Cork will be paired with France.
The Cork French Film Festival runs March 2nd - 8th - find out more here
