The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
An essential and timeless theme if ever there was one, love naturally holds a special place in cinema. Romantic, sensual, obsessive, ambiguous, forbidden, lighthearted or profound, love on screen is as diverse as the individuals who live its stories. Drawing form different eras, tones, and cinematic styles, this program brings together a selection of remarkable films that will warm your heart from the start of the winter season to Valentine’s Day.
Winner of the Palme d'or, 1964 Cannes Film Festival
This film is preserved in our collections
Geneviève runs an umbrella business with her mother. She is in love with Guy, a young garage owner who is soon to leave for military service in Algeria.
Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy was a French director, screenwriter and lyricist. He appeared at the height of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy's films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and opera. His films contain overlapping continuity (some characters cross over from film to film), lush musical scores (typically composed by Michel Legrand) and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave. Demy is best known for the two musicals he directed in the mid-1960s: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).
