L’APPRENANTE (THE LEARNER), 7min., France, Drama
Directed by Angelique Kalani Axelrode
L’Apprenante is an American college student in the process of “finding herself abroad” in Paris. She takes French classes to immerse herself in the culture, even though her accent is tragique. In one particular class, she struggles to recount her weekend where she goes to a Parisian party and meets La Femme; a girl she is immediately drawn to. As she navigates the discomfort of learning a new language, she also navigates the discomfort of discovering her queerness. Her inability to get out of her head inhibits her not only from improving her French, but also from being vulnerable with La Femme. Will she ever be able to commit to the accent and make a move? Impossible n’est pas français.n
https://www.tiktok.com/@lapprenantefilm
Get to know the filmmaker:
I made this film as a way to process some things I was personally grappling with. Like many queer people, I knew I wasn’t straight long before I said or did anything about it. My queerness lived in my head where I would replay interactions I had with people almost obsessively- oh were we flirting? Was she hitting on me? Why did I run away? If only I had said this. Or maybe if I hadn’t been so drunk. Or maybe if I had been a bit more drunk… Imaginary scenarios where I finally mustered up the courage to be intimate with someone else were only temporarily satisfying. I had to learn to get out of my head and actually act on my queer impulses. “L’Apprenante” is about this awkward process. The idea for this film came to me while I was living in Paris at the beginning of 2022 and feeling a sense of freedom I haven’t experienced since studying abroad in college. I was rediscovering myself and relearning what it means to be vulnerable, realizing I had very little vocabulary to work with. It felt like learning an entirely new language- one, like French, that sounds nothing like it is written.
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