8 Arthouse Filmmakers You Didn’t Notice Released Films In 2016

French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali blasted off with the artistic injection of La Nouvelle Vague. Friend of Jacques Demy, he wrote for renowned magazines Cahiers du cinéma and La Revue du cinéma, produced the first films of Jean Eustache and his debut, Les Petits Drames, was enthusiastically received by François Truffaut. His movies picked up an experimental, or as he likes to call it, “research” tone from the New Wave, and guided it on an autobiographical path, which more often than not mixes with assorted sexuality.

Le Cancre, which literally means “the dunce”, is the title of a poem by Jacques Prévert. The fact that Vecchiali named his film alike doesn’t seem conceptually and technically fortuitous, because it is about two men, father and son, one of them played by the very director, lost in their past and present lives, respectively, whilst the product offers more shabby sequences than an experienced auteur should allow.

Since he has been very active during his more than fifty years of moviemaking (six feature films from 2010 onwards, that’ll give you an idea), it was expected that his last opus didn’t attract much attention (Woody Allen syndrome), even though it was screened out of competition at Cannes Film Festival.