CHS French Students Present Films to Prospective French Learners

“C'est incroyable” one French student said after watching all the French films that his peers created. Unbelievable as it was, students from French III, IV, and V shared their French film projects in the CMS auditorium on Wednesday, January 16th to a group of new and prospective French learners.

The student filmmakers presented their film projects to the students from both French I and II at the high school, the French I middle school class, and a group of sixth-grade French students. The sole purpose of this presentation was to show prospective French learners what they could do with the French language in the future.

For this project, student filmmakers were placed in groups and then assigned one scene of the French play Véronique, Fille Unique, a title meaning “Véronique, Only Child.” In the play, fifteen-year-old Montreal-native Véronique finds out that not only is she adopted, but she has a twin brother who lives in Brussels named Bruno, allowing Véronique to discover a part of her family that she never knew she had.

In class, students started reading the film at the beginning of the year but started the film project itself at the start of the second quarter. They had to create English subtitles for the film, assign themselves characters, and finally film themselves performing the scene in the form of a movie. Every group of students utilized locations, props, different camera angles, and costumes to create one unified film that truly showcased their skills in French as well as technology.

During the presentation, not only were the viewers able to watch the films, but they were able to ask a panel of French students questions about how they made their movies and any difficulties that they had, creating a unique opportunity for younger students to see what they would be able to do in the higher French classes.

Upon talking to French teacher Madame Leatham, we discovered that it was not the first time that this project has been done. She started the project with her eighth-grade class in a previous teaching job in Connecticut when she herself controlled the camera so that the students could “focus on just performing.”

Eventually, however, as she introduced the project to her high school students in Chariho, Madame Leatham opened the project up for more creativity. For her, the best part was the “personalization and playfulness” of how the students approached the project and also saying that she loved how she “could give the resources, give the script, give the radio theater version to practice pronunciation, lay the foundation of reading the scenes beforehand, making sure the students understood them beforehand, but then let them go and let them work on it independently as they did.”

Madame Leatham describes the project itself as a full success this year and will definitely look forward to doing it again next year.

Picture courtesy of clipart-library.com.