Sealing the French and American friendship

The Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, offered by the French to the Amer­i­cans, cel­e­brates its 140^th birth­day this year, at the very moment when we cel­e­brate, on both sides of the Atlantic, the 250^th anniver­sary of Amer­i­can independence.

This face of iron and leg­end, born from Gus­tave Eif­fel’s work­shops, a sym­bol of hos­pi­tal­i­ty, gen­eros­i­ty and faith in the future, echoes the role of sen­tinel and that vision­ary pow­er that Amer­i­can artists and the city of New York have always represented.

Through the choice of extreme close-up, it is a cin­e­mat­ic syn­tax that we invoke to pro­voke, ques­tion, and move, as only the sev­enth art knows how to do, and to con­tin­ue car­ry­ing the hope of light through­out the world, as in dark theaters.

On this anniver­sary date, the Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val seals an unbreak­able friend­ship on the artis­tic ground and reaf­firms its com­mit­ment to free­dom, a free­dom that Alex­is de Toc­queville so right­ly con­se­crat­ed as the supreme val­ue of this young nation still in the making.