diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.24.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.24.0.rst
index a18739f4b26bff..5213120b33f06f 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.24.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.24.0.rst
@@ -1790,6 +1790,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_dict` when the resulting dict contains non-Python scalars in the case of numeric data (:issue:`23753`)
 - :func:`DataFrame.to_string()`, :func:`DataFrame.to_html()`, :func:`DataFrame.to_latex()` will correctly format output when a string is passed as the ``float_format`` argument (:issue:`21625`, :issue:`22270`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` that caused it to raise ``OverflowError`` when trying to use 'inf' as ``na_value`` with integer index column (:issue:`17128`)
+- Bug in :func:`read_csv` that caused the C engine on Python 3.6+ on Windows to improperly read CSV filenames with accented or special characters (:issue:`15086`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_fwf` in which the compression type of a file was not being properly inferred (:issue:`22199`)
 - Bug in :func:`pandas.io.json.json_normalize` that caused it to raise ``TypeError`` when two consecutive elements of ``record_path`` are dicts (:issue:`22706`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_stata`, :class:`pandas.io.stata.StataWriter` and :class:`pandas.io.stata.StataWriter117` where a exception would leave a partially written and invalid dta file (:issue:`23573`)
diff --git a/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx b/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
index e0fcf102701f42..6cb6ed749f87b1 100644
--- a/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
+++ b/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx
@@ -677,7 +677,13 @@ cdef class TextReader:
 
         if isinstance(source, basestring):
             if not isinstance(source, bytes):
-                source = source.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding() or 'utf-8')
+                if compat.PY36 and compat.is_platform_windows():
+                    # see gh-15086.
+                    encoding = "mbcs"
+                else:
+                    encoding = sys.getfilesystemencoding() or "utf-8"
+
+                source = source.encode(encoding)
 
             if self.memory_map:
                 ptr = new_mmap(source)
diff --git a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
index 6860452f5ccc4e..d87ef7cd15a648 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
@@ -1904,6 +1904,18 @@ def test_suppress_error_output(all_parsers, capsys):
     assert captured.err == ""
 
 
+def test_filename_with_special_chars(all_parsers):
+    # see gh-15086.
+    parser = all_parsers
+    df = DataFrame({"a": [1, 2, 3]})
+
+    with tm.ensure_clean("sé-es-vé.csv") as path:
+        df.to_csv(path, index=False)
+
+        result = parser.read_csv(path)
+        tm.assert_frame_equal(result, df)
+
+
 def test_read_table_deprecated(all_parsers):
     # see gh-21948
     parser = all_parsers