Film Screening: Cinémélodie—Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)

JJoin us for the final installment of our 2025/2026 music-themed series, Cinémélodie: French director Jacques Demy 1964 musical romantic drama *Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)*!

We kicked off Cinémélodie in September with a screening of Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort, and so it’s only fitting that we bookend the series with the other musical for which he is best known.

Guests will enjoy a complimentary glass of Louis Jadot Bourgogne and the chance to win a $50 gift certificate to the Sofitel Magnificent Mile’s très chic Le Bar.

Doors at 6:00 p.m. Screening at 6:30. Please enter via 54 W Chicago Ave. Non-alcoholic options will be available.

About the Film

Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo star as two young lovers in the French city of Cherbourg, separated by circumstance. The film’s dialogue is entirely sung as recitative, including casual conversation, and is sung-through like some operas and stage musicals.[3] It has been seen as the second of an informal tetralogy of Demy films that share some of the same actors, characters, and overall atmosphere of romantic melancholy, coming after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Model Shop (1969).

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. In the United States, it was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Original Screenplay (Demy), Best Original Score (Demy and Legrand), and Best Original Song for the film’s main theme, “I Will Wait for You”. It was later adapted into an English-language stage musical.

In 2018, a BBC Culture critics’ poll ranked the film in the Top 100 Greatest Non-English Films of All Time.

About the Director

Jacques Demy was a French director, screenwriter and lyricist. He appeared at the height of the French New Wave alongside contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Demy’s films are celebrated for their visual style, which drew upon diverse sources such as classic Hollywood musicals, the plein-air realism of his French New Wave colleagues, fairy tales, jazz, Japanese manga, and the opera. His films contain overlapping continuity (i.e., characters cross over from film to film), lush musical scores (typically composed by Michel Legrand) and motifs like teenage love, labor rights, chance encounters, incest, and the intersection between dreams and reality. He was married to Agnès Varda, another prominent director of the French New Wave. Demy is best known for the two musicals he directed in the mid-1960s: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).

Getting Here

The Alliance Française de Chicago is one block from the CTA Red line stop at Chicago Ave. Best bus routes are the 22 on Clark St and the 66 on Chicago Ave. A Divvy station is located in front of the 54 W Chicago Ave entrance.

Parking Information

$12 for 12 hours at InterPark at 100 W Chestnut St. Validation is available at reception.

Please be advised that students, members, and attendees at cultural events or programs may be photographed, and these images may be used for marketing purposes.