Mostly known as a director of photography but previously acclaimed as a film director on account of her medium-length movie, Daniel (awarded a Special Mention in the 2019 Berlinale’s Generation Kplus section), French filmmaker Marine Atlan has made the transition to feature films with La Gradiva, which was very well received in competition at the 65th edition of Critics’ Week, unspooling within the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

Cineuropa: The title of your film refers to a short novel published in 1903 by German writer Wilhelm Jensen. Was the book the impetus for your project?
Marine Atlan: I’ve been interested in Pompei for a long time, and I found out this book existed thanks to Freud’s analysis of it, which questions dream interpretation and imagines Pompei as a land of the subconscious. I found it intriguing and devoured it. I liked its mysterious, Latin acoustics, the figure of the walking woman, which is like an allegory of destiny. I started imagining the film, and that figure contrasting with its realist tone. That’s how I decided on the title, with the idea of starting work on the film without any preconceptions, propelled by that mystery and the female figure.

Why did you choose to focus on a high school trip set in the modern-day?
I wanted to create a kind of clash between the group of youngsters, their present reality, and the eternal nature of the ruins. I’ve always been fascinated by Pompei because it feels like an immense off-screen space, a snapshot of history. I wanted to see what it would trigger into terms of dramaturgy and aesthetics, and to juxtapose the very specific period of adolescence with wider history.

What was your approach to painting this multi-faceted portrait of late adolescence?
I started with Rimbaud’s poem, You’re Not Serious, When You’re 17, to really focus on that time in our lives when we don’t take things seriously. I soon got the idea for an ensemble film, for having several viewpoints to explore how we behave in a group when we’re teenagers (different representations, different statuses) and trying to be as accurate as possible when it came to their energy and group dynamics. My co-screenwriter Anne Brouillet and I adopted a slightly documentarian approach: we carried out interviews with young people and we observed a school trip. When it came to the writing, we were committed to seeing the modern reality or what was new for the youth of 2025 and what’s always tended to repeat itself and what we recognised as being part of our own experiences. We had to pin down the 20 characters really quickly, and I was aware the film would be carried by its collective force, both in terms of the story and the acting.

You’ve injected a hint of mystery into the story.
There’s a level of tension in the film. There’s an investigation carried out by Toni who’s looking for his roots, who’s life is characterised by absence, who can’t find the answers he’s looking for. There was also the idea of arriving in a land which gradually consumes all the characters. It’s a very unique area that’s connected with the death caused by Vesuvius, but which is also full of life.  Little by little, all the characters lose their footing and the film slides from a very realistic register into something more tense, suspended, and more melodramatic.

How did you sidestep the picture-postcard side of Naples during filming?
Just like the kids, we didn’t need to imagine the land, we just needed to really look at it. I visited a few times in the writing phase but also a month before the shoot, with a camera. It helped me to understand and to try to reflect its traditions, its rituals, its beliefs, its insanely noisy, large, chaotic and really romantic density, but without sliding into idyllic depictions, just using my foreigner’s gaze. As with Toni, who isn’t familiar with this country but who’s heard talk of it, who’s fascinated but who sees that there’s more to this fascination, I tried to describe the different layers of this area using a documentary-like approach, also to leave room for its inhabitants.

You’re first and foremost a director of photography. What were your intentions for the visuals of this film which has a really unique look?
We shot the film with several cameras and several mounts. Our references were realist baroque or even Quattrocento paintings. Naples is a really colourful city and I wanted to magnify those colours, which also matched our ideas for the film’s tone, so being highly realistic, very documentarian, but also gradually leaning into something more lyrical and more expressive.