L'Auberge Espagnole

L'Auberge Espagnole (/l oʊˈbɛərʒ ˌɛspənˈjoʊl, -pæ-/; literally: "the Spanish inn"; released in some English-speaking territories as Pot Luck or The Spanish Apartment) is a 2002 French-Spanish film directed and written by Cédric Klapisch. It is a co-production between Spain (Mate Producciones S.A., Via Digital) and France (BAC Films, Ce qui me meut, France 2 Cinéma, Studio Canal).

It is about Xavier (Romain Duris), an economics graduate student studying for a year in Barcelona, Spain as part of the Erasmus programme, where he encounters and learns from a group of students who hail from all over Western Europe. It is the first part of the self-titled "Spanish Apartment Trilogy" of films centered on the character of Xavier and his progression from student to family man and friends he initially encounters in a student share-house in Spain.

The film's portrayal is in the first-person perspective of the main character, Xavier, and is hence mainly narrated in French. Some of the dialogue is in English and a significant amount is in Spanish, as well as small amounts in Catalan, Danish, German and Italian.

Auberge

Auberge is a French word for an inn, and is also sometimes used to refer to a restaurant (as a result of the historical association between inns and restaurants). On Wikipedia, it may refer to:

Inns

Music

See also

Cédric Klapisch

Cédric Klapisch (French: [se.dʁik kla.piʃ] ; born 4 September 1961) is a French film director, screenwriter and producer.

Life and career

Klapisch was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine. He is from a Jewish family; his maternal grandparents were deported to Auschwitz. He studied cinema at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle as well as at the University of Paris VIII. He was rejected on two occasions by the prestigious French film school IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques), now known as La fémis. He later attended the film school at New York University from 1983 to 1985. During the 1980s, he started to shoot short films such as In transit or Ce qui me meut. He subsequently worked as a scriptwriter and he became a director for feature films. He has also directed a nature documentary for French television.

In 1992, Klapisch shot his first feature film, Riens du tout. A year later, a TV channel asked him to make a film about high school life, set in 1975, Le péril jeune. The film had a very small budget and featured Romain Duris and Vincent Elbaz, who would become two of his favourite actors. Due to its success when broadcast on TV, the film was released in the theaters two years later. During the 1990s, Klapisch made three short films to encourage the use of condoms in combatting AIDS: La chambre, Le Poisson Rouge and Le Ramoneur des Lilas.