Terrence Cullen, Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, and Rupinder Kaur, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, were awarded an Albertine Cinémathèque Festival Grant for Vassar’s 2025-2026 French film festival.

The festival is organized around the theme of “art and artifice.” Six films—including Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—interrogate the relationship between fact, fiction, art, and artifice across a range of aesthetic traditions and historical contexts, from personal identities to political movements, from Madagascar to the Jura. Viewers will encounter multiple perspectives on French artistic traditions and come away with a fuller understanding of how those traditions can illuminate the cultural, political, and historical forces that shape the Francophone world.

This festival offers a deeply enriching experience for students at Vassar and for the broader Hudson Valley community. Through this festival, the team hopes to achieve three main goals: to introduce students and the wider community to French cinema in a region where access to foreign films is limited; to foster collaboration between students, faculty, staff, and the larger community by integrating films into course curricula, inviting faculty to introduce and discuss films, and publicizing the event to community members; and to create an opportunity for discussion and intellectual exchange through this festival’s emphasis on arts and their intersections with French and francophone history and culture.

All screenings will be held in Taylor Hall, Room 203 at 6:30 p.m. on these dates, and all are welcome to join: February 3, February 5, February 12, February 18, and February 24.

Albertine Cinémathèque is part of the French For All initiative by Villa Albertine–The French Institute for Culture and Education, and Albertine Foundation, and is made possible with the support from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC).