La Culture Oui, But Why?

Alum from the Lycée Francais de New York and Graduate in Urban Design, Hadrien Cassan is a cultural mediator for the Jeanne Claude and Christo project of the Wrapped Arc de Triomple. He is spending half of his days under the monument welcoming the public. He tells us about the project from the inside. .

As we are commemorating the 20th anniversary of 09/11, we asked French-American Director Jules Naudet who was the first person, together with a few firefighters, to enter Tower 1 at the World Trade Center, what he remembered from that very special day. Jules and his brother Gedeon were filming a documentary on firefighters and happened to be near the Twin Towers by pure chance. The raw footage Jul...

Born in Tunisia, Emel evokes her childhood and her musical beginnings. Singing in English and in Arabic, sometimes in French, Emel talks about identity as a language of creation. What is it to be a Francophone and belong to this French-speaking cultural world? Her latest album, still in the making, is dedicated to women and among them, the most vulnerable. " I change the story to change History an...

Film Director Remi Chayé ( Up North , Calamity Jane ), special guest at the Lycee and at Animation First, FIAF Animated film festival (ww.fiaf.org), talks about his works and his latest movie Calamity Jane. He talks in French about his inspiration, and the industry of animated movies in general.

French born Delphine Selles is Film Curator at the French Institute Alliance Francaise (FIAF) in New York. There she co-curates with French cinema consultant Catherine Lamairesse, Animation First, an animated film festival that runs through February. We learn that Director Remi Chayé is one of the special guests this year and that a students jury will elect their favorite movies. Delphine talks ab...

French producer, filmmaker and writer Benoit Cohen has been living in Brooklyn since 2014. In 2019, we invited him at the Lycée Français de New York to talk about his books. The first one Yellow Cab is about his personal experience: Cohen drove a cab around the five boroughs for a few months, in the perspective of writing a screenplay about a French actress becoming a taxi driver in New York and f...

Writer Abdourahman Waberi was born in Djibouti in 1965 when Djibouti was a French colony, and his native language was somali. He came to France in 1985 to study English Litterature.  He started his career as an English teacher in Caen in Normandy while pursuing in parallel a career as a writer in French. His first collection of short stories Le pays sans ombre published in France in 1994, was tran...

Herve Tullet Born in France, in Avranches, Herve Tullet is an artist, a performer and an author of children books. After 10 years spent in advertising, he started illustrating children books. The first one was published in 1994 and called How Daddy met Mommy . It was an instant success. Since 1994, Hervé has published over 80 books and received many awards. His books are meant for children from al...

French Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo who is based in Brooklyn talks about her work, her photography and collages. Former assistant to American artist Peter Beard, Delphine Diallo chooses to concentrate on the beauty and strength of Black women's bodies as a way to find her own identity. Established in New York since 2011, Delphine also talks about her love for the city. Delphine is one of the...

  Lucie Tiberghien is a French and American theater director and translator, based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2018, she founded Molière in the Park, the first non-profit in Brooklyn solely dedicated to bringing free theater to Prospect Park on a yearly basis.  Last June, she co-presented with French Institute Alliance Francaise, a Tartuffe online that was dubbed "Revolutionary" by the New York Times thea...

Lycée Français de New York Alum Maxime Boublil is a French pop songwriter living in L.A. who has been in the industry for over six years. As a songwriter, he works with music studios affiliated with Warner and Sony as well as independent labels. HIs goal is "to put his heart into artist's songs hoping to find the perfect melody that will elevate and hopefully create the record the artist deserves....

Belgian Actor Ronald Guttman performs on August 21, 2020 at Guild Hall in East Hampton a dramatization of novel The Fall by French writer Albert Camus (1913-1960). La Culture Oui, But Why? explores the acting world of Ronald Guttman and invites screen-writer Alexis lloyd who adapted the novel to theater. The monologue will also be performed in October at the French Institute Alliance Francaise in...

The French King Francis the First sent the explorer Giovanni de Verrazano to find a road to Asia. Verrazano arrived in New York in April 16, 1524 aboard La Dauphone. He called the bay "Marguerite" after Francis the First's sister and called the land Angouleme as Francis I was also Count of Angouleme. A copy of Verrazano's report sits at the Morgan Library in a secluded room. The report was redisco...

Today we are meeting French artist Beatrice Coron. She creates cut out silhouettes. Beatrice can talk at length about this art form invented in China and later came to France where Etienne de Silhouette, Minister of Finance under Louis XV, introduced the first portraits à la silhouette ;   She is present these days at the The New York HIstorical Society with an exhibition called  Hi Five! : Storie...

Born in Marseille from an Egyptian family, Lucien Zayan, spent most of his working life in theater and music, working as producer in France for famous cultural hubs like le théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris or the Festival d'art lyrique in Aix-en-Provence to name a few. He arrived in New York and landed in Brooklyn. He fell in love with the Invisible Dog, a former factory that made invisible leaches for...