Ira Holmes International Film Series wraps up with bonus short film festival on April 12

The finale of the College of Central Florida (CF) Ira Holmes International Film Series’ 60th anniversary season will be a bonus short film festival scheduled for Tuesday, April 12.

Highlights from the festival include two of 1962’s “best short films,” according to the CF press release: “Vive Le Tour,” Louis Malle’s “energetic evocation of the Tour de France,” and “La Jetée,” Chris Marker’s tale of time travel told in still images, which remains one of the “most influential, radical science fiction films ever made.”

In “Vive Le Tour”—or “live the ride” in English—Malle captures, in just 18 minutes, “the epic experience of this test of human endurance, as well as its furious pace and idiosyncratic personalities” involved in that most famed of French bicycle races, according to The Criterion Collection’s website. 

While Marker’s “La Jetée,” or “the jetty,” is the kind of film that “haunts the brain,” said film critics Michael Koresky and Casey Moore in a 2012 co-written video essay on the French film, a quality “attributable not only to its unforgettable post-apocalyptic imagery but also to its soundscapes, as spare as they are ravishing and mysterious.”

Terry Gilliam’s 1995 feature-length film “12 Monkeys,” produced in the United States and starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt and Madeleine Stowe, was directly inspired by and borrows much from Marker’s 28-minute short film.

Films featured in the short film festival will be shown at 2 p.m. at the Appleton Museum of Art, located at 4333 E. Silver Springs Blvd., and again at 7 p.m., at the CF Ocala Campus, located at 3001 S.W. College Road, Building 8, Room 110. Films at the Ocala Campus are free and open to the public, while films at the Appleton are free to all museum and film series members. Nonmembers must pay museum admission. Films may contain mature content. 

For more details, visit CF.edu/filmseries.