MOBILE, Ala. — The University of South Alabama has been awarded the Albertine Cinematheque grant by the Cultural Services of the French Consulate to host a campus-wide 2026-2027 French Film Festival.
Students Helped Choose the Films
An interdisciplinary committee, including students, chose the six films that will be screened over the next few months.
That composition matters to the outcome. A festival programmed entirely by faculty in a language department tends toward a canon — the films that are taught. Including students from across disciplines produces a lineup selected partly for what people will actually attend.
Cinema as the Seventh Art
“In France, cinema has deep cultural significance; they call it the ‘seventh art,’ and they take it seriously as an art form, but movies are also meant to be entertaining,” said Dr. Susan McCready, professor of French in the College of Arts and Sciences.
“We chose films across a variety of genres — animation, comedy, social drama, science fiction and horror — because we want everyone to be able to find something that speaks to them. The festival is free and open to the public.”
The phrase McCready references has a specific origin. The Italian critic Ricciotto Canudo argued in a 1911 manifesto that cinema was a seventh art, synthesizing the six that preceded it — architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry and dance. The term took hold in French criticism and remains in common use there in a way it never did in English.
That framing is reflected in French cultural policy, which treats film as a public good supported through funding mechanisms, quotas and preservation programs rather than purely as a commercial product.
The Genre Range Is the Point
Animation, comedy, social drama, science fiction and horror is an unusually broad slate for a university French festival, and it is a deliberate rejection of a narrow definition of foreign-language cinema.
French filmmaking has produced substantial work in every one of those categories, but the films that travel to American arthouse audiences skew heavily toward social drama. A festival that includes horror and science fiction presents a national cinema as its own audiences experience it — as a full commercial and artistic ecosystem rather than a curated selection of prestige exports.
It also lowers the barrier for attendance. A student who would not choose a subtitled drama may well turn out for a subtitled horror film.
About the Grant
The Albertine Cinematheque program is administered through the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Consulate in the United States, supporting French film screenings at cultural and academic institutions across the country. Grants of this kind typically cover screening rights, subtitled prints and promotional support.
For a university, that support is what makes a free public festival feasible. Licensing films for public exhibition is the principal cost in running one, and it is the reason most campus screenings are limited to enrolled students.
Free and Open to the Public
The festival is free and open to the public, and will run across the 2026-2027 academic year.
Screening dates, titles and campus locations are expected from the University of South Alabama’s College of Arts and Sciences.