The 2015 Tournées French Film Festival is being hosted at TCU in Moudy North 141.

Ernest et Célestine, directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner, is a cartoon entirely in French. The cartoon was shown Tuesday night with English subtitles as the kick-off feature of a six-week French film series which is open to the public.

A French film will be shown in Moudy North at 7 p.m. for free every Tuesday night until March 3. Five of the six films are contemporary French films. The other is a classic.

The festival is in its 19th year and is on TCU’s campus as a result of a three-year grant won by Dr. Joshua Blaylock, an assistant professor of French.

The grant comes from the French American Cultural Exchange. According to its website, FACE aims to “promote cultural exchange between France and the U.S. through grant programs and special projects in all the disciplines of the arts and education.”

The Tournées Festival is one of FACE’s programs.

Blaylock, who joined TCU’s faculty last semester, said the idea of the film festival is to expose people to a different kind of cinema.

“They may be familiar with American independent films, but maybe not so much French cinema,” Blaylock said. “So that’s kind of the idea: to show some French contemporary examples of French cinema, which is the second largest cinema in the world.”

He said the festival is placed on campuses located in places that don’t have access to French culture.

“I’ll be attending all of the films,” Amber Hovanec-Carey, a sophomore English major, said. “It was different. And there were people from different majors, not just French.”

When asked how TCU students could benefit from the festival, Blaylock said they’d generally work with French students as many of the films have been incorporated into the curriculum.

“There’s an immediate benefit for our students,” Blaylock said. “They’ll be exposed, they’ll be working with the films, learning how to write reviews of the films, for example, in French and things like that.”

Blaylock said the ultimate goal of the festival is to use the free films to expand the horizons of TCU students.

He said he hopes the audience walks away from the festival understanding that there is a “tremendous variety” of genres in the French film industry.