The festival

The Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val was cre­at­ed in 1975 by Lionel Chouchan and André Hal­i­mi under the impe­tus of Michel d’Or­nano, then May­or of Deauville, and Lucien Bar­rière, then Chair­man of the epony­mous group. The City of Deauville del­e­gates the co-orga­ni­za­tion of the Fes­ti­val to ‘le Pub­lic Sys­tème Ciné­ma’ and to the C.I.D. LPSC pro­vides artis­tic direc­tion and the C.I.D brings its skills in event organization.

The Fes­ti­val high­lights the diver­si­ty of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma, from major Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions to inde­pen­dent films. It is the only Euro­pean fes­ti­val of this scale to open its doors to the pub­lic. Each year, more than one hun­dred screen­ings are pre­sent­ed on three sites: the Cen­ter Inter­na­tion­al de Deauville, the Ciné­ma du Casi­no Bar­rière and the Ciné­ma le Morny.

The Fes­ti­val has revealed works of art which have marked cin­e­ma his­to­ry: James Gray’s Lit­tle Odessa, Dar­ren Aronof­sky’s Pi, Tom DiCil­lo’s Liv­ing in Obliv­ion, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovitch, Christo­pher Nolan’s Memen­to, Todd Solondz’s Wel­come to the Doll­house, Paul Hag­gis’s Crash, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hed­wig and the Angry Inch, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Day­ton’s Lit­tle Miss Sun­shine, Jeff Nichols’s Take Shel­ter, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Matt Ross’s Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic, Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the South­ern Wild, David Low­ery’s A Ghost Story….the Fes­ti­val is praised each year for the qual­i­ty and high stan­dard of its programming.