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On Friday, the University of Tampa opened its season of the Albertine Cinémathèque series with La Nuit du 12, a 2022 neo-noir film based on the real, unsolved murder of a 20-year-old woman outside of Paris in 2013.

Despite receiving six César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, La Nuit du 12 (The Night of the 12th) received only a limited theatrical release in the U.S. in 2023. This screening in the Charlene A. Gordon Theater, attended by campus and community members, gave cinephiles and Francophiles another chance to experience the film on the big screen, with a premier sound system, and surrounded by fellow enthusiasts.

International studies major Drew Barnes had seen a few French films before, but as a freshman, this was his first time at an Albertine Cinémathèque screening. “I thought this was a really good one,” he said. “The way that it left some of the ends untied, because the case was never solved, had me in suspense the whole time.”

Vanessa Rukholm, the associate professor of languages and linguistics who organized the series, agreed with Barnes and added that the film had a different take on police work than you might see in an American film. “It was more about the rapport between the investigators — focusing on the male relationships in the police precinct and the character development,” she said. “That’s one thing I love about French films, that emphasis on the narrative and the story; you’re really getting into the minds and thinking of the characters.”

The film series, which has run on campus nearly a dozen years, is co-hosted by the Department of Language and Linguistics and the Department of Film, Animation and New Media, with support from Albertine Cinémathèque, a grant program by the French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation for American universities to expand access to French cinema.

One of the main objectives of the program is to expose filmgoers to points of view from other cultures.

“Numerous students have said that, at first, they thought it would be intimidating to watch a film in a foreign language, but then with the subtitles, they were able to follow along,” said Rukholm. “And from our French students, we heard that it gave them a chance to hear French in another context.” Barnes, who is fluent in French, Spanish, Greek and English, considers himself a lover of all languages and hopes to catch some of the other screenings over the next few weeks.

Rukholm curated the series with the theme of poursuites, or pursuits, in mind. “For instance, in La Nuit du 12, the detective protagonists are motivated by a pursuit of the truth behind the murder of a young woman,” she explained. “Each film selected for our screenings has at its core a pursuit of some kind or other.”

All screenings in the series will take place in the Gordon Theater and are free and open to the public. The remaining films are as follows:

• Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), Thursday, Feb. 12, at noon. In this 2024 adaptation of the classic tale, Edmond Dantès returns from an island prison as the count of Monte Cristo to exact revenge on the men who betrayed him.
• Dahomey, Tuesday, Feb. 17, at 4 p.m. This 2024 dramatized documentary follows the return of 26 royal artifacts to what used to be the West African kingdom Dahomey and is now modern-day Benin after they were stolen by French colonists in the 19th century.
• Toni en Famille (Toni), Wednesday, Feb. 25, at 11:30 a.m. In this dramedy from 2023, Toni is a single mother to five children whose two oldest children are leaving for university, prompting her to wonder what she will do with her life when they are all grown and independent.
• Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Saturday, Feb. 28, at 2 p.m. This vibrant Technicolor musical from 1964 centers on 17-year-old Geneviève, an employee in her mother’s chic but financially struggling umbrella shop who faces a life-altering decision when her lover is sent to Algeria for war.
• La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (The Taste of Things), Tuesday, March 3, at 6 p.m. This 2023 period drama set in 1889 tells the love story between Dodin, a gourmet chef, and his esteemed cook, Eugénie.