The French New Wave is regarded as a brilliant explosion of vibrant and innovative films from post-war France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which dramatically altered the language of cinema and influenced generations of filmmakers to this day. 

Also known as the “Nouvelle Vague,” it gave birth to a new kind of cinema that was highly self-aware and revolutionary to contrived mainstream filmmaking. A group of young French critics contributed to and edited the journal Cahiers du Cinema, putting forth their belief that many contemporary films had lost their ability to capture truth and sincere human emotion. They felt the films were out of step with how people actually lived, and set out to create new methods of filmmaking to showcase the richness and intimacy of the human experience. These critics also established the oft-contested “auteur theory”, and many of them presciently embarked on filmmaking careers which would establish them as auteurs, themselves.