The films selected for the Tournées Film Festival at the College of Staten Island, in cooperation with the Department of Media Culture, provide a window onto a culture that is at once similar yet different. By engaging French culture through cinema, students and others in New York are afforded the opportunity to encounter a new vantage point on issues such as immigration and sexuality while at the same time introducing classic French cinema.

The complex questions French filmmakers explore provide provocative and thoughtful approaches to world culture and filmmaking. Like in the U.S., France and Europe are undergoing significant transformations in the twenty-first century. The Tournées Festival at CSI delivers new ways to consider the use of cinematic means to express similarly complex issues confronted at home.