21/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: In this charming documentary, Guillaume Brac captures a snapshot of today's youth by filming the last days of high school for a group of boarding school kids

“I'm going to listen to you. You're free to say whatever you want.” These words from an English teacher open Guillaume Brac's Ce n'est qu'un au revoir - unveiled in the ACID programme at the 77th Cannes Film Festival - and are answered much further on in the documentary by the high school students through a philosophy exercise: “Is freedom an illusion?” It is between these two poles that a delicate filmmaker navigates smoothly, with great charm and no pretension, whose recent favourite subject has been the observation of youth (through fiction with All Hands on Deck [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guillaume Brac
film profile] and through documentary with Treasure Island [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guillaume Brac
film profile]). This time, however, he has chosen a pivotal moment that unites “the present of the past, the present of the present and the present of the future” as he has set up his camera in a boarding school in the Drôme region where a group of almost future baccalaureate holders are preparing to leave for good.

“We're not going to lose touch. It's a new life.” We start to take down the photos and posters on the walls in the three-person rooms, we still have fun playing mattress dominoes in the corridors or trying to break the rules to get to the boys' floor, we chat on the benches in the courtyard, we go for walks in town, we swim in the river, we dance, we cry a little at having to leave each other. Summer has arrived, but it's like the end of the season before a rebirth that we don't yet understand. A transition suspended in time, moving, uncertain, friendly and fragile as we are at 18, which Guillaume Brac turns into a generational mirror through a group portrait from which he extracts four girls in particular (Aurore, Nours, Jeanne and Diane).

Past sadness still raw (a bereavement, a mother who lost her zest for life, a father who sacrificed his dreams of travelling to see his daughter grow up), defence of the living world and militant commitment, right up to the demonstrations against “megabassines” ("for a long time I resented my parents for having given me life when things were not going well in the world, but they gave me values to act on”), doubts about direction and fear of the unknown of what the near future represents (new studies, new towns, new friends perhaps, but it's not so sure, especially as you're leaving behind well-known and appreciated faces): through a libertarian and pointillist inventory of fixtures, with a touch of melancholy (as one teacher points out: “that time will never come back. It's like gold in a bar”), Ce n'est qu'un au revoir gently and aptly exposes all the contrasts of today's youth.

Ce n’est qu’un au revoir was produced by bathysphère which also handles international sales.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)