We are here on our eleventh (!) and final day of recapping the Cannes Film Festival. While the festival isn’t over yet and there are some prizes still left to be handed out, we have enjoyed our time in the South of France and look forward to next year. (Hopefully with some Hollywood movies this time.)
‘La Gradiva’ Wins Cannes Critics’ Week
While it’s not the Palme d’Or, the Cannes’ Critics Week has awarded its top honor, the AMI Paris Grand Prize. The parallel section to the main competition is a sidebar comprised of first or second features, with the jury headed by director Payal Kapadia, the filmmaker behind “All We Imagine As Light” (which premiered at Cannes in 2024 and won the Grand Prix prize at that year’s festival).
The prize was given to Marine Atlan’s debut feature “La Gradiva,” a coming-of-age drama. “A group of French high-school students travel to Naples on a school trip to discover the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius. There, they are drawn into a dizzying descent. One by one, they are swept up in desire and anger, until they surrender to them completely,” reads the official Cannes program. Watch a clip from the film below.
Other awards that were given out included the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award, which went to Spanish director Aina Clotet for her directorial debut “Viva;” the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution was awarded to “A Girl Unknown” from director Zou Jing; and the SACD Award was given to “Dua,” from director Blerta Basholli. On the short film side of things, the Sony Discovery Prize for Short Film went to “Skinny Boots” from director: Romain F. Dubois while the Canal+ Award for Short Film was awarded to “Vaterland or A Bule Named Yanto” by director Berthold Wahjudi.
But back to “La Gradiva.” Was the movie really that good?
According to our reviewer Chase Hutchinson, absolutely. Hutchinson called the movie “magnificent, melancholic and moving” (alliteration!) and said it was “one of those true discoveries that you only get a few times in life. It’s not just an illuminating portrait of youth, but a potent film about history, the now, and the future, gently reflecting on big questions through the eyes of a generation right on the cusp of having to face down all of it as adults.”
Hopefully we won’t have to wait to long to see the film for ourselves, as the New York-based distribution company 1-2 Special has acquired all North American rights to the film, following its monumental win.
Netflix Scoops ‘In Waves’ Out of Cannes
A Canal+ Controversy Heats Up
While not directly Cannes-facing, a controversy is rocking the French film industry, as a French petition that is directed at right-wing media mogul Vincent Bolloré has now gained the support of Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, along with directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Ken Loach, among hundreds of others. The petition was launched last week, right as the Cannes Film Festival started. It began with 600 French film professionals, including Juliette Binoche and Damien Bonnard, but has ballooned to more than 3,500 signatures. It was first published in French newspaper French newspaper Libération.
The issue at the heart of the petition is that Bolloré is the largest shareholder in French studio Canal+, which owns Studiocanal, France’s largest production and distribution company. Canal+ is currently attempting to acquire full control of UGC, France’s third-largest movie theater chain. According to the petition, CNews, part of Bolloré’s media empire, promotes far-right ideas and the UGC deal would be disastrous. “Leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner [risks] not only the standardization of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination,” read the letter.
Last weekend, Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada spoke at a producers’ lunch, where he called the petition “an injustice towards the Canal teams who are committed to defending the independence of Canal+, and in all the diversity of its choices. And as a result, I will no longer work; I no longer wish Canal to work with the people who signed this petition.”
He went on to essentially blacklist any performer or filmmaker who signed the letter from working with Canal+. “Well, I don’t want to work with people who call me a crypto-fascist,” Saada said, which doesn’t exactly sound like something a crypto-fascist wouldn’t say.
While not explicitly a Cannes story, apparently at screenings at the Festival, the Canal+ logo has been met with spirited booing. We love a good Cannes booing!
“Rehearsals for a Revolution” Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics
“Rehearsals for a Revolution,” a biographical documentary from Pegah Ahangarani, which just won the L’Œil d’Or prize at Cannes, was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution later this year. It premiered in the Special Screenings section of the festival.
The documentary traces 40 years in the life of Ahangarani, from 1979 to 2026. The film is a co-production between a co-production between Iran, Czech Republic and Spain.
“Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story. Drawing from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, she retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history,” per the official logline. “From the early days of 1979, until the war that began in 2026, she pieces together intimate and collective memories, forming the portrait of a country shaped by political repression and in constant hope for a revolution.”
Ahangarani wrote and directed, with co-writers Ehsan Abdipour, Amir Ahmadi Arian, Arash Ashtiani and Majed Neisi, and Arash Ashtiani as editor.
SPC’s deal includes all rights in North and Latin America, Asia (except Japan), New Zealand, Turkey and Portugal, as well as worldwide airlines. That’s right – it’s coming soon to an overlong Delta flight near you.
If this doesn’t sound like a Best Documentary Feature Oscar contender, we don’t know what does.
Some More Reviews!
How about some more reviews, huh?
There’s “Everytime,” which our reviewer Chase Hutchinson called “a delicate, devastating portrait of grief,” anchored by a dynamite Birgit Minichmayr “as a mother grappling with an immense lost.” The film, which played as part of the Un Certain Regard section of the festival, is the kind of drama that you will find hard to shake. “Sandra Wollner’s uncompromising, understated meditation on all-consuming grief and the ripple effects it can have on the rest of our lives as we try to carry on,” is how our critic described the film. In the words of Marty McFly: heavy.
Then there’s Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s decades-spanning queer romance “La Bola Negra,” which our critic Zachary Lee called “one of those rare films that feels both old and new.” “Indeed, above all else, the directors find ways to show how the past and present should not be viewed as separate but intimately and achingly connected. They achieve a lot of this through clever cross-cutting — their editor, Alberto Gutiérrez, deserves praise for cutting across so many time periods cleverly without making it all feel too montage-esque,” reads the review. “It’s not perfect though, as sometimes Gutiérrez can be a bit too zealous in showing the connections from one story to another that he halts the narrative momentum of what’s going on just to make a broader point on the whole.”
There’s also “Coward,” a queer drama from Lukas Dhont that our reviewer Ben Croll says is “all but certain to be Belgium’s Oscar submission.” According to Croll, Dhont “has made an almost elementally straightforward war drama built around queer love and desire. Premiering at Cannes, spoken in French and Flemish, and all but certain to be Belgium’s Oscar submission, this heritage film waves its flag without apology.” Croll asserts that Dhont “offers a corrective to a much more recent attempt to erase what was already there, making his case with force, pageantry and outsized patriotic zeal. All the same, the film is rather subversive, moving away from trench-based misery to reimagine the front as a place of great freedom and romantic possibility.”
And last but certainly not least is “The Birthday Party,” from Léa Mysius, who co-wrote and directed “The Five Devils,” which premiered at Cannes in 2022 and is still one of the very best movies of the past few years. (Seriously, it’s wonderful.) She also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated “Emilia Perez.” Make of that what you will. According to our reviewer Zachary Lee, “The Birthday Party” is less ambitious than “The Five Devils” (which combined a family drama with elements of time travel and the supernatural) – it’s more of a straightforward home invasion thriller. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. “There’s easily another version of this story that could have been the movie of the week on Netflix, but Mysius and her team are too talented, too adroitly adept at merging the universal emotions of their characters with the cultural specificity of this story, to deliver anything less than compelling,” Lee wrote.
