Modern Languages with Film Studies

Modern Languages with Film Studies is a combination that allows you to develop high-level linguistic competence alongside a serious engagement with cinema as an art form, cultural product, and social document. Film is central to any country's cultural life, and studying it in relation to the languages and cultures of other nations opens a particularly rich analytical space. French, Italian, and Spanish cinema, for instance, have each produced distinctive traditions and contributed major works to the history of film, and understanding those works in their original languages and cultural contexts deepens your appreciation of both the films and the societies that produced them.

At the University of Leicester, this four-year, full-time programme dedicates approximately one third of your study to film studies and the remaining two thirds to one or two languages chosen from French, Italian, and Spanish. You will develop maximum fluency in your chosen language or languages through a combination of language skills classes and the study of literature, culture, history, and society in the target language. The film studies component gives you a firm grounding in film theory, film history, and critical approaches to cinema, equipping you to analyse films from formal, historical, and cultural perspectives.

The combination means you will engage with cinema from an unusually integrated standpoint, able to read films both as aesthetic objects and as products of specific linguistic and cultural environments.

Graduates of Modern Languages with Film Studies work in education, translation, the film and television industries, publishing, cultural diplomacy, arts administration, and international business. The linguistic fluency and cultural knowledge the degree provides are valued wherever organisations operate across French, Italian, or Spanish-speaking markets. Many graduates go on to postgraduate study in modern languages, film studies, translation, or education, building specialist expertise for research or professional careers.