Brandeis’ Albertine French Film Festival first came to fruition in June 2025, when Professor Harder and Professor Niehaus of the French and Francophone Studies Department received a 2025-26 Albertine Cinémathèque Festival Grant. The grant program is part of Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education, which is a division of the French Embassy in the United States. I corresponded with Professor Harder to learn more about the festival and how it was organized. Professor Harder explained that, “the Albertine French Film Festival is designed to expand access to French and Francophone cinema in U.S. colleges and universities for students, faculty and other movie fans. Brandeis University was one of 43 grant recipients this year. Professor Niehaus and I have been working with members of the Brandeis community to organize the festival, secure sponsors and promote interest in the event.”
After the success of last year’s Albertine French Film Festival, the department wanted to expand further this year to “promote better understanding of Francophone cultures across the globe and encourage students to engage in the discussion of social and political questions in the Francophone world.” The festival serves as a way for the student population to learn about French and Francophone history, providing “a valuable immersion experience for students, both linguistically and culturally.” The festival gives the Brandeis community an opportunity to reconsider perspectives, “introduce new areas of interest and motivate us to
search for ideas that lie beyond those in the movie script.”
The festival grant allows each university to choose six films, five contemporary and one classic. In the 2025-26 film festival, the department will show three movies in the Fall 2025 semester and three movies in the Spring 2026 semester. “Disco Boy,” a film directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese, a first-time film director, was showcased on Friday, Oct. 17. “Dahomey,” directed by Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, who won the Silver Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024, was recently shown on Thursday, Oct. 23.
Professors Harder and Niehaus “hope that the Albertine French Film Festival will prompt students to develop an interest in watching more French-language cinema and in learning more about the French language and about Francophone cultures.”
If you are interested in the festival, the French and Francophone Studies Department would love for you to attend future showings in the Wasserman Cinematheque. The last one of the semester, scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 30, is titled “When Fall is Coming” and is a mystery/drama. The general plot follows a grandmother who recently retired to the countryside and her grandson, who visits her; suddenly, an accident occurs, and the mystery begins to unfold …
Next semester, “Army of Shadows,” a film about the French Resistance, will be shown on Friday, Feb. 27; “Ghost Trail,” “a movie about retribution and justice for a former Syrian prisoner,” will be shown on Thursday, March 5; and the last film of the year, “Meeting with Pol Pot,” “reveals the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the late 1970s” and will be shown on Thursday, March 12.
