16/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: Marine Atlan crafts a staggeringly rich and highly artistic first feature film following in the wake of a group of French youngsters on a school trip in Italy

"Let the experience and your emotions flow; look at bodies, faces, movements, colours." As if in response to this advice from a teacher on how her high school students, who are spending a few days in Naples, should feel when observing and bringing to life a work of art from a far and distant past, French filmmaker Marine Atlan (well known as a distinguished director of photography) is offering up a multi-faceted and particularly accomplished first feature film entitled La Gradiva, which was unveiled in competition in Critics’ Week as part of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Her secret: capturing the sensorial and psychological intensity of the seismic shock that comes with the end of adolescence, in the shadow of Vesuvius.

"Are you alright, little Frenchman? Not too lost?" For Toni (Colas Quignard), the charismatic troublemaker in the Parisian sixth form class who’ve been crammed into a train to Pompei by their Latin teacher, Mrs Mercier (Antonia Buresi), the trip promises to be an existential and romantic quest: his grandmother, a poor domestic help, lost the love of her life, who was a young dignitary, in an earthquake in 1980, and subsequently fled to France, devastated. A photo of her and the villa (before it was consumed by the catastrophe) attests to this, and, despite a lack of leads, between smoking drugs and spending balmy nights with men he meets on an app, Toni clings onto the idea that he belongs in the city of Naples, whose liveliness appeals to him. Meanwhile, his best friend - a journalist’s son called James (Mitia Capellier) - is a more sarcastic type and an unscrupulous profiteer of opportunities for one-night-stands ("we don’t actually have much to say to each other") with his classmates. Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), who’s uncomfortable in her skin, watches them trying to strike this precarious and energetic balance, characteristic of their age and of a gnawing fear over the future ("I feel out of place, I don’t know anyone") and what they don’t know. In this "dolce vita" setting, amidst cultural visits, tension soon sets in, hanging like a threat ("the body’s still there but it’s like all life has departed it") over this young collective who are concealing their loneliness…

Creating an ensemble film which endows each and every protagonist (both the youngsters and the adult looking out for them) with a strong identity, which gradually and organically emerges over a relatively short time period (the six days of the school trip), sketching out a generational portrait that’s full of humanity, communicating cultural information, creating a dialogue between the past and the present, conveying the atmosphere of the location while eschewing a touristic approach, blending the strange and the familiar in equal measures, opening the door to a number of interpretations and peppering the work with a dramatic air of things unresolved… It’s not just any old filmmaker who could pull all this off. Allowing the different sequences to speak for themselves in a style anchored in documentary realism which is superbly well developed visually speaking, the director (who penned the brilliant screenplay with Anne Brouillet) leaves a very personal mark and succeeds her rite of passage to feature film with flying colours.

La Gradiva (a title referring to an early 20th century novel by German writer Wilhelm Jensen, which inspired Freud and the surrealists) was produced by French firm Les Films du Poisson, in co-production with Italy’s BiBi Film. World sales are entrusted to mk2.

(Translated from French)