Second Annual Albertine French Film Festival

The French and Francophone Studies Program at Brandeis University is excited to announce the second season of the Albertine Festival of French Film, to be held in the Wasserman cinematheque in the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters.

Presented in a curated series of three screenings each semester, the festival will showcase six French and Francophone films consisting of classic films and contemporary releases. This year’s lineup includes Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres), a landmark portrayal of the French Resistance; François Ozon’s newest mystery thriller, When Fall Is Coming (Quand vient l’automne), and Rithy Panh’s exploration of the Khmer Rouge régime in Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot). Recent works by dynamic, emerging directors include Mati Diop’s Dahomey, a critically acclaimed documentary, and two powerful new feature films: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy and Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail (Fantômes). These films feature performances by some of the most celebrated actors in French cinema history—Simone Signoret, Jean-Pierre Cassel —alongside an exciting new generation of talent such as Ludivine Sagnier (Lupin), Franz Rogowski (Bird), and Adam Bessa (Extraction).

Screenings will be free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Albertine Cinémathèque, a program of FACE Foundation and Villa Albertine, with support from the CNC/Centre National du Cinema and SACEM/Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain. Additional support from the Brandeis Division of Creative Arts, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Film, Television, and Interactive Media program, and the School of Arts and Sciences.

SCHEDULE

Friday, October 17, 2025: Spotlight on Political Thriller: Disco Boy

Friday, October 24, 2025: Spotlight on Documentary: Dahomey

Thursday, October 30, 2025: Spotlight on Mystery: Quand vient l'automne

Friday, February 27, 2026: Spotlight on Classic Film: L'Armée des ombres

Thursday, March 5, 2026: Spotlight on Political Thriller: Fantômes

Thursday, March 12, 2026: Spotlight on Historical Drama: Rendez-vous avez Pol Pot

Info: Awarded Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival.

Following a difficult journey across Europe, Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) reaches Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion — a highly selective military corp that allows any foreigner, even undocumented, to be granted a French passport. In the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) fights against oil companies that threaten the survival of his village. His sister Udoka (Laëtitia Ky), meanwhile, dreams of escaping, knowing that all is already lost here. Beyond borders, life and death, their destinies will intertwine. (Text Courtesy of the Albertine Foundation, https://albertinefoundation.org/disco-boy/)

Info: The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—filmmaker Mati Diop documents their voyage back. As with her layered, supernaturally tinged Atlantics, Diop takes a singular approach to contemporary questions around belonging in our postcolonial world, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition, and employing multiple points of view, including—most strikingly—those of the artifacts themselves as they sail in darkness over the ocean to their rightful home. (Text Courtesy of the 2025 New York Film Festival.)

Info: Michelle is a perfect grandmother who lives in a pretty village in Burgundy. She loves to chat and pick mushrooms with her best friend Marie-Claude. When her daughter Valérie drops her son off for the holidays, the perfect image cracks and François Ozon's new film turns into a tragedy. (Text Courtesy of Cinéfranco)

Info: In 1942, French engineer and Resistant cell leader Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Managing to escape, we follow Gerbier and his Resistance allies through operations, camaraderie and espionage — and witness the constant threat of capture, danger and the tough decisions that need to be taken to stay alive. (Text Courtesy of The Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN)

Info: Two years after being released from Syrian J*il, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world—and our own. (Text Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center)

Info: In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution," is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. (Text Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center)

Host or Publisher French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University