A SEASON IN FRANCE (UNE SAISON EN FRANCE) World Cinema

Abbas (Eriq Ebouaney) is living the life of many migrant workers. Formerly a scholar in his home country of the Central African Republic, he now crates produce for a vendor in Paris, trying to make ends meet so that his children can have a stable life away from the civil war violence that left them motherless. As Abbas awaits news on gaining asylum, he spends time with his girlfriend Carole (French icon Sandrine Bonnaire), who is a French citizen but the daughter of immigrants, and his brother Etienne, who has internalized his own painful struggles to a dangerous degree. With A SEASON IN FRANCE, Chadian auteur Mahamat-Saleh Haroun gives us an urgently empathetic portrait of lives uprooted, hanging in the balance of borders and bureaucracies. – Beth Hanna