Deauville American Film Festival Marks 50th Anniversary With Retrospective Of 50 Films That “Changed The Way We Look At The World”

Melanie Goodfellow
·3-min read

France’s Deauville American Film Festival has announced a retrospective gathering 50 U.S. features that have challenged perceptions of the world to mark its 50th anniversary.

The selection ranges from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent epic Intolerance to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and also includes Ida Lupino’s groundbreaking 1950 rape drama Outrage as well as Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. (see full list below)

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“Cinema has always made us dream, travel, desire, fantasize, laugh, cry. But how many films have been able to shake up our certainties, question our beliefs, question our prejudices and put our own views into perspective?,” said the festival.

“The Deauville American Film Festival wanted to highlight a selection of 50 films that have changed the way we look at the world,” it continued.

Launched in 1975, the festival unfolding in the swanky Normandy beach resort of Deauville, annually fetes Hollywood talent and also supports American indie cinema through its competition focused on U.S. features by emerging talents with or seeking distribution in France.

Recent winners have included Shane Atkinson’s LaRay, Texas, Charlotte Wells’ US-produced and backed breakout Aftersun as well Annie Silverstein’s Bull and Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road.

This year’s anniversary edition is under new interim management following the suspension of the festival’s long-time director Bruno Barde last month, following accusations by seven women of sexual harassment, which he has denied.

As previously announced, Michael Douglas will be guest of honor at the 50th edition in what will be his fifth trip to the festival, for which he says he has a special affection as the place where he met his now wife Catherine Zeta Jones.

The 50th edition runs from September 6 to 15.

Full Retrospective Line-Up

  • 1916       Intolerance, D. W. Griffith

  • 1927       Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

  • 1932       Freaks, Tod Browning

  • 1939       Gone With The Wind, Victor Fleming

  • 1940       The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin

  • 1941       Citizen Kane, Orson Welles

  • 1942       Casablanca, Michael Curtiz

  • 1942       To Be Or Not To Be, Ernst Lubitsch

  • 1946       It’s A Wonderful Life,  Frank Capra

  • 1950       Outrage, Ida Lupino

  • 1950       All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz

  • 1955       The Night Of The Hunter, Charles Laughton

  • 1956       The Searchers, John Ford

  • 1959       Anatomy Of A Murder, Otto Preminger

  • 1959       Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks

  • 1959       Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk

  • 1959       Some Like It Hot,  Billy Wilder

  • 1960       Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock

  • 1961       West Side Story, Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

  • 1967       Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn

  • 1968       2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick

  • 1969       Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper

  • 1969       The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah

  • 1970       Wanda, Barbara Loden

  • 1972       The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola

  • 1972       Cabaret, Bob Fosse

  • 1973       The Exorcist, William Friedkin

  • 1974       A Woman Under The Influence, John Cassavetes

  • 1975       One Flew Out Of The Cuckoo Nest, Milos Forman

  • 1976       Network, Sidney Lumet

  • 1976       Carrie, Brian de Palma

  • 1976       Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese

  • 1977       Star Wars, Georges Lucas

  • 1978       The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino

  • 1982       E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg

  • 1982       Rambo, Ted Kotcheff

  • 1984       Terminator, James Cameron

  • 1989       Do The Right Thing,  Spike Lee

  • 1990       Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton

  • 1992       Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood

  • 1997       Boogie Nights,  Paul Thomas Anderson

  • 1999       Matrix, the Wachowskis

  • 1999       Virgin Suicides,  Sofia Coppola

  • 2001       Mulholland Drive,  David Lynch

  • 2003       Elephant,  Gus Van Sant

  • 2007       Zodiac, David Fincher

  • 2010      Inception, Christopher Nolan

  • 2012       Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow

  • 2015       Spotlight,  Tom McCarthy

  • 2019       Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino

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