You can sit at home and watch on your computer or your TV tens of thousands (am I exaggerating?) of films. Cable stations, streaming sites, YouTube. All over. Not only too many to watch, but too many to choose from.

Yet, the movie theater business still exists, although not as vibrantly as it once did. And beyond that, film festivals appear to continue to be big business.

DC is filled with film festivals. In addition to the DC Film Festival, there is the EU film festival, the Jewish film festival (which now seems to be running 12 months a year), festivals focusing on certain genres, like documentaries, and on certain countries of origin, like Korea and Iran, to name two examples. Over the past year, we have actually gone to some showings at these festivals. We went to two films at the Jewish film festival, and two at the EU festival this year, and last night we went to the first of two we are seeing at the 2025 DC Film Festival.

The film last night is called (in English) “Rodrigue in Love”, and it’s a French comedy (rom-com, I guess, would be more precise) that is to be released to theaters in June. It was fun, to be sure, but I think, as they say, loses something in translation. I do not know French and, as opposed to a lot of people, have no affinity for the language, which to me sounds like a bunch of squished up vowels. But my guess is that, for those who understand the language, the film is much more clever. The subtitles were relatively flat, and the film is not a physical comedy, so I know a lot must have been lost.

The story takes place in Avignon, where there is an annual theater festival. As I understand it from Wikipedia, there are actually two festivals that take place there simultaneously, the “On” and the “Off”. The On is the official festival, while the Off is a large, chaotic, informal festival with performances by amateur theater companies taking place all around town. I assume that “Rodrigue in Love” takes place in the Off festival, but it isn’t specified.

At any event, we have a struggling (to put it mildly) company putting on a play written by the company’s director titled My Sister Collapses (or something like that), starring a young down-on-his-luck actor, performing in a third class theater, tickets being free. It is a slapstick comedy, a genre not preferred by the with-it theater crowd. And when the star of the show runs into an actress who is not so down-on-her-luck, and finds that she remembers him from a workshop they did together four years before, he decides that she is the girl for him. To impress her, he tells her that he has the lead in Corneille’s El Cid, playing Rodrigue.

Fiction becomes reality becomes fiction. The main story line in El Cid is about two lovers who come from two different never-to-seen-together classes, and that is exactly what we have in the film. And the only reason the fiction is able to be continued is that the plays are all being performed at the same time, so that the actress is never able to come and see the El Cid. Until she can.

It reminded me of a play I saw years ago, Boeing Boeing, where the lead actor was able to maintain relationships with a number of international stewardesses, carefully paying attention to their schedules, until jets were introduced on the cross-Atlantic flights and everyone began to stumble on each other.

The portrayal of the festival in Avignon is very interesting and the life of struggling actors is fun to watch, but clearly would not be fun to live. That reminds me of something else…….

We at the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies are putting on a Zoom interview with actor Richard Kind next month, where he will talk about his career and how it intersects with his Jewish upbringing and life. I have been reading about Richard Kind, and saw someone wrote that once he spoke to a high school or college class and was asked (of course): For a young person who wants to be an actor, what do you suggest for them? His answer was: Don’t do it.

Apparently the instructor tried to modify his words, saying something like: I think what Mr. Kind is saying is that, unless you really love becoming an actor, don’t do it. At which point, Kind interrupted, and said: That’s not what I meant. I meant “Don’t do it”.

If you saw the struggles and frustrations of the life of young struggling actors in Avignon, you two would respond, if asked by someone of becoming an actor, “don’t do it”.

By the way, if you are interested in Richard Kind, go to http://www.habermaninstitute.org, and register. It’s free.

As for the DC film festival, our other film is not French (I am happy to say), it’s Icelandic. Called “Odd Fish”. Thursday night.

My Icelandic is only moderately better than my French. But I remember my old high school Latin teacher, Eugene Schmidt. He was, so they said, fluent in Icelandic.