6 French Films That Show You the Real France Outside of Paris (No Hollywood Sparkle Just Rural Life)

I’ve lived in rural Charente since 2016, and one of the many pleasures of that decade has been watching French films and recognizing the shape of my own life on screen. None of which looks anything like a Hollywood movie, I’ll hasten to add. I’ve taken to watching French films as a way to help me learn French, and although I have subtitles, I’m needing them less and less now.

Most films set in France that Americans see are Paris films. Amélie, Midnight in Paris, Marie Antoinette, for example. They’re great movies, but they show maybe 2% of the country. The other 98% looks like where I actually live.

These are the films I’d hand to anyone who wants to understand what France looks like once you leave the périphérique. Some are a little quirky, but don’t give up, you’ll end up loving them as much as I do. 

Être et Avoir (2002)

Nicolas Philibert spent a school year in a single-classroom village school in Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson in the Auvergne, filming the teacher Georges Lopez and his thirteen pupils, ages four to eleven. The result became the highest-grossing documentary in French history at the time of its release and was nominated for a César.

Interestingly, I can relate to this movie as my daughter spent a year in a single-class school when we lived on Hayman Island in tropical north Queensland, Australia. One teacher handles every age group in one room.

The film also captures the rhythm of the agricultural year in a way Paris films can’t. The children are driven home along roads I recognize without ever having driven them, because every department in rural France has roads like these: narrow, hedged, slightly too small for the cars on them.

Le Grand Chemin (1987)

Jean-Loup Hubert’s film is set in a Brittany village in 1959, where a 9-year-old Parisian boy is parked with family friends for the summer while his mother gives birth in the city. The village is Rouans, in Loire-Atlantique, and Hubert grew up there. It shows.

Anémone won a César for her performance as the godmother, and Richard Bohringer is wrenching as the husband who drinks too much and grieves a dead child no one will talk about. 

The village around them is full of the small social machinery that still runs places like mine. The neighbor who knows everything, the curé who sees the family at Mass and pretends he doesn’t see the bruises, and the kids who run barefoot through gardens they aren’t supposed to and will get a whack for if they’re caught.

I watched this again last year and was struck by how much of the daily texture has survived in rural France even now. The shutters closed against the afternoon sun, the long lunch, the daily trip to the boulangerie. 

I leave my front door open all day, even when I go to the shops, the way Anémone’s character does, because that’s what you did and what some people still do if you live as we do.

Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (1986)

Claude Berri’s two-part adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s novels is set in Provence between the wars, in the hills above Aubagne. It’s the film that put Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Yves Montand together on screen.

The plot turns on water. A spring on a piece of land. Who knows about it, who blocks it, who suffers. I’ve watched neighbors in my own commune fall out over a boundary hedge and a drainage ditch, and the Pagnol story sits closer to that reality than to anything sentimental.

Village memory is long, and slights are inherited, which I’ve also seen for myself. The films are honest about how isolation breeds both loyalty and meanness, sometimes in the same person within the same afternoon.

Berri was shot in the actual Provençal back country, in villages like Mirabeau and Vaugines, and you can almost feel the heat coming through the screen. If you’ve ever driven the small roads between Apt and Manosque in July, you’ve driven through the world of these films. The light is the same, as are the men sitting on a low wall at five in the afternoon, watching the road, saying very little.

Les Choristes (2004)

Christophe Barratier’s film is set in a grim boys’ boarding school in 1949, in a stone building in the middle of nowhere. The exteriors were shot at the Château de Ravel in the Puy-de-Dôme, and the interiors at the Abbaye Saint-André in Meymac, Corrèze. Both are deeply rural, deeply Auvergnat.

The film became one of the highest-grossing French films of all time, partly because of the choral music and partly because anyone in France over fifty recognized the cold corridors and the cruelty of mid-century boarding school discipline. 

My neighbor, who’s in her eighties and grew up in the Limousin, told me once that her schoolmaster used to make children kneel on rulers as punishment. She said the film didn’t shock her, but it did bring back uncomfortable memories.

What the film does well, beyond the music, is show the kind of rural isolation that used to define institutional childhood in France. 

The Town Is Quiet (La Ville Est Tranquille, 2000)

Robert Guédiguian has been making films about Marseille and its outskirts for forty years, and this one is the bleakest. It follows half a dozen characters in the working-class neighborhoods around the port: tower blocks, fish markets at 4 am, dock work, heroin, racism, neighbors who’ve known each other too long and not well enough.

Marseille isn’t rural, but Guédiguian’s France belongs in this list because he films small-town life inside a city. His characters live within ten streets of each other, and drink in the same bar. They sleep with each other’s husbands and then sit next to each other at funerals. That density of acquaintance is what village life feels like, anywhere in France, although I will say we aren’t all sleeping with other people.

His regular ensemble, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, and Gérard Meylan, has worked with him for decades. You start to recognize their faces across the films, the way you recognize people in Hollywood movies. If you want to see the France that didn’t get the post-2000 property boom, the France of closed factories and bus stops with no shelter, Guédiguian is where you go.

Petit Paysan (2017)

Two recent films about French farmers, both based partly on the directors’ own families. Petit Paysan, directed by Hubert Charuel, is about a young dairy farmer in the Haute-Marne who discovers one of his cows has a contagious disease and tries to hide it rather than have the entire herd destroyed. 

Au Nom de la Terre (2019)

Au Nom de la Terre, directed by Édouard Bergeon, is about a farmer in the Deux-Sèvres slowly broken by debt and isolation, based on the director’s own father.