ENGL 3313/5351: Beyond the Red Carpet: The Cannes Film Festival and Global Cinema Study Abroad More Information

Dates: May 12-26, 2026

Locations: Cannes, France

Contact: Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef (fbenyous@ttu.edu)

Led by a TTU film professor who has attended the festival since 2009 as an accredited participant, this class will offer students a rare vision of the Cannes Film Festival beyond the red carpet.

The study abroad class on contemporary global cinema will be an online course, with a pronounced field component in Cannes, France (May 12–23, 2026). Serving a mixture of both undergraduate and graduate students, the course is a Maymester 2026 course. As part of the course, students will attend the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, gaining full access to the Semaine de La Critique/Critics' Week sidebar, which will include targeted master classes for class participants with featured filmmakers as well as festival curators. Complementing our discussions at the field site, luminaries in international film festival programming will be invited to join the Zoom classroom after the festival.

Via such an abroad component, the course will introduce students to international film festivals, including the curatorial decisions as well as the political and social developments they respond to, along with a range of film genres. Master classes with guest speakers will serve as a forum to discuss directorial intent as well as the craft of curation. At the site, students will complete journal assignments and have sessions with both the instructor and peers to discuss the featured films in-depth.

In addition to scholarship on the featured film genres/filmmakers as well as theoretical and sociological texts design to contextualize the festival offerings, students will also read work around the art of film festival curation. Through a series of targeted assignments, as well as dialogue-driven class sessions, students will familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of formal analysis of film and will produce the following final projects: either a research paper around the featured films/genres/filmmakers (10 pages for undergraduates and 20 to 25 pages for graduate students) OR, through scaffolded exercises, their own proposed film festival along with an extensive articulation of their curatorial philosophy.

Ultimately, through the abroad class, students will gain a remarkable window, marked by exceptional access, to the world's most prestigious film festival. They will gain a rich view of contemporary global cinema, the realities of international film festivals while also gaining the tools necessary to produce high level scholarship on cinema (both at the undergraduate and graduate level) and to curate films with a coherent political and ethical vision. Ultimately, participating students will be able to clearly and fully see beyond the red carpet’s sometimes overwhelming glamour.

For Financial Aid information from the Study Abroad office, please visit the Study Abroad office's financial aid information page.