Take a continental journey at European Union Film Festival

The 20th annual Chicago European Union Film Festival kicks off Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Programmers Barbara Scharres and Martin Rubin offer Chicago premieres of 62 features from the 28 European Union nations. Year after year, their taste is on the mark.

Auteurs of note in the four-week fest include the Dardennes brothers, Doris Dörrie and François Ozon. The line-up includes best foreign language film Oscar submissions from Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Netherlands and Slovakia. Check the online schedule for updates on screenings with filmmakers in attendance.

Pierre Clive Agius, ambassador of the Republic of Malta, and Herbert Quelle, consul general of Germany in Chicago, co-host the opening-night screening of Jameson Cucciardi’s “20,000 Reasons“ (6 p.m. March 3). This so-so romantic comedy was crafted under the aegis of the Malta Film Commission to train local talent.

More appealing is the animated film “Louise by the Shore,” closing the festival at 6:15 p.m. March 30. Jean-François Laguionie portrays an old woman finding solitude after unusual rains isolate her at a French beach resort.

Capsules of recommended narratives and documentaries follow:

MARCH 3

2 p.m. “Cezanne and Me” (France): With scenes time-stamped from 1852 to 1888, Daniele Thompson studies the tempestuous friendship of French painter Paul Cezanne and French novelist Emile Zola. This sensually detailed period drama is attuned to artistic ideals and personal flaws. Gossipy in places, this double biopic is a commendable primer on two careers. (Also 6 p.m. March 7)

MARCH 4

4 p.m. “Personal Shopper” (France): Writer-director Olivier Assayas again casts Kristen Stewart as a character assisting a celebrity. As in “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Stewart delivers a nuanced performance. Suffering a heart defect that recently ended the life of her twin brother, her Maureen encounters a ghost who floats glasses in the air then drops them on the floor. Assayas finesses a bevy of genres. (Also 6 p.m. March 8)

8 p.m. “The Fabulous Baron Munchausen” (Czech Republic): A spaceman from Earth lands on the moon. An earlier arrival misperceives him to be a lunar local and escorts him to see Constantinople. Surreal adventures ensue. Karel Zeman’s 1962 marvel was preceded by a 1943 version and followed by another in 1988. Restorationists of this partly animated gem are coming to both shows. (Also 5:15 p.m. March 5)

MARCH 5

3:15 p.m. “A German Youth” (Germany/France/Switzerland): Jean-Gabriel Périot insightfully exhumes films by and about the Red Army Faction. West Germany’s left radicalized from anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist protesting to bombing and bank-robbing. Meanwhile, the 1970s inspired apolitical product, as seen in the CEUFF documentary “Doomed Love: A Journey Through German Genre Film.” (Also 6:15 p.m. March 7)

MARCH 11

4 p.m. “Slack Bay” (France): In the summer of 1910, a romance blooms between teens from a bourgeois family and poor neighbors. Bumbling inspectors check on missing tourists. Director Bruno Dumont goes nuts here with class-based cannibalism and feats of windward levitation. Juliette Binoche stars as a loony snob. (Also 6 p.m. March 16)

MARCH 17

6 p.m. “After Love” (Belgium/France): Joachim Fosse elicits superb turns from Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn, playing the unhappy parents of twin girls. Unrelated to the offhand “Afterlov,” another fest entry about a couple breaking up, Joachim Lafosse’s drama is a deeply felt tale of class mismatch. (Also 6 p.m. March 20)

8 p.m. “Dawn” (Latvia/Estonia): Masterly black-and-white mobile cinematography graces Laila Pakalniņa’s weird riff on Latvian nostalgia. Under Soviet control a collective farm implodes with madcap contradictions. Irony is all over the place. This is Bela Tarr on nitrous oxide. (Also, 8 p.m. March 21)

MARCH 26

3:15 p.m. “Austerlitz” (Germany): In long immobile takes, Sergei Loznitsa frames throngs of summer tourists visiting concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. This black-and-white documentary stuns as an unsettling ethnography of a secondhand Holocaust. (Also 6 p.m March 29)

Bill Stamets is a Chicago freelance reviewer.