This year’s Cannes Film Festival was overstuffed with masters of European and Asian cinema — Hamaguchi, Farhadi, Almodóvar, Kore-eda, Mungiu, Pawlikowski, Zvyagintsev and so on. Some of their anticipated new works landed better than others; a select few are now making the fall-festival rounds in hopes of gaining some Oscar momentum. But on the Croisette back in May, one teen-centered drama programmed outside of the Main Competition emerged as the clear critical favorite that no one saw coming: La Gradiva, Marine Atlan’s debut feature, which went on to win the Grand Prize in the Critics’ Week sidebar. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s review called it a “stunning feature debut,” and it remains at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.)

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Acquired out of Cannes for a December release stateside by 1-2 Special, La Gradiva is a finalist in the competition to become France’s Oscar submission and will make its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto Film Festival on Monday. The film follows a French class on a school trip to Pompeii and features almost all newcomers in the ensemble. With Atlan, a highly regarded cinematographer, splitting D.P. duties with Pierre Mazoyer, the movie introduces itself with a stark realist aesthetic, immersing viewers in the day-to-day of dozens of students harboring confusing crushes, anxiously awaiting news about their futures, arguing about the dire state of modern capitalism. La Gradiva’s seamless verisimilitude is a testament both to Atlan’s authority behind the camera and to the extensive research that went into the script — a portrait of adolescence ringing at once bracingly of the moment and achingly timeless.

La Gradiva takes a tragic turn in its final act that forces a reexamination of the loose, observant filmmaking that led to it. The arcs of the main characters — Toni (Colas Quignard), eager to investigate his family’s connection to Pompeii between hookups with various men around town; his best friend, James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), who seems to have everything going for him; and loner Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), just about fed up with her peers — converge in surprising, heartbreaking ways. And in the process, Atlan asserts herself as a major director to watch.

Below, she breaks down the various stages of making La Gradiva — as well as what the last few months have been like, since that electric Cannes launch. 

THE IDEA

The idea came to me at one point for a film that I imagined could be more quickly made, instantaneous in a sense and gathering together a troupe of people. It was very inspired by a series of films that was made in France in the 1990s called Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge — quite well-known in France and featuring filmmakers whom I love, like André Téchiné and Chantal Akerman. So I had this idea of a collective film that would be made quickly with non-professional actors; the desire was to have a group of non-professional young people and confront them with these 2,000-year-old ruins and to see what that would give in terms of narrative and aesthetics. There was this very ancient territory in contrast with a group of young people.

Then there was this text, Gradiva, by [Wilhelm] Jensen, which has accompanied me over the last few years. I liked the way that Freud sees it, drawing from it this idea that Pompeii is a metaphor for the unconscious. While another film project was kind of resisting me, what wound up being my first film actually grabbed me quite quickly, and I found this film quite quickly — notably, its choral nature, the multiple characters, and also Toni’s trajectory. But the basic desire for this film was indeed the contrast between a specific territory and this group of young people. The relationship between the present and the remains of the past.

THE CASTING

Like a lot of things on this film, it was work that was done in layers. Initially, we wrote a version of the screenplay, which my co-writer Anne Brouillet and I were quite happy with, and then we went into a very long casting process. We were in the casting process for two years. Initially, we worked with one casting director for quite a long time, and then a second picked up from her later in the process. We were working with a small crew on street casting, which is where you go to high schools while they’re letting out for the day; you go to political demonstrations, you go to non-professional acting classes. The goal was to find the three leads, and based on that, we would find the constellation of the entire class to build around them.

Once we found the leads, our discussions with them were about what they felt that they could and couldn’t do. So, for instance, the intimate scenes, the sex scenes — we talked about that a good deal with Colas Quignard, who plays Toni. He told us what he felt he could and couldn’t do, and so we rewrote based on that. Then we put in months of work on rehearsals. We rehearsed every single scene, and in those rehearsals, we did improvisations. Then my co-screenwriter and I would watch recordings of these improvs, and based on what had come up in the improvs, we would see how we wanted to adjust some things in the story, things that had been found in the characters or the dynamics. The characters didn’t really fundamentally change, but they did deepen with the embodiment of the actors and actresses.

To take an example, you have the character of James, who comes from great privilege and is very handsome. Everyone is attracted to him. But when Mitia [Capellier-Audat], the actor, came into the project, we found a level of androgyny and fluidity with that — the character that creates a really different relationship to masculinity. These were things that perhaps would have been less obvious at first glance.

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THE RESEARCH

It was very important from the start, when we began writing, not to fantasize about this generation — to go looking for what is immutable, unchangeable about adolescence, about being 17, which kind of brings together all human experience — and also to find what is specific to this generation and this contemporary moment. I absolutely did not want to project my memories onto this story. We put everything in place so that I would be able to approach this in a documentary style. Before we began production, we went and interviewed young people to talk about gender, sexuality, feminism, environmentalism — and then we actually accompanied a school trip to remind ourselves of what happens in these moments that are so intense, to learn about the selection systems that exist in high schools in France and that produce so much anxiety. To remember also how extremely condensed this period of time is.

There was this constant back and forth in making the film between things that I was reliving and then also things that I was seeing in these young people that my generation did not experience or that didn’t characterize my generation. So, for instance, I would say that they have a very precise vocabulary to identify and name power relations, which doesn’t remove the existence of these relationships of power within the classroom, but they are able to name and perhaps understand them better than we were, through this vocabulary that they’ve developed. 

There’s also a much more intense relationship to the state of the world and the violence of the world that’s really visible in them. I mean, you can see a level of disillusionment in these young people. Now, of course, they’re not all the same. There’s still the nonchalance, the feeling of being all-powerful that many teenagers have. But there is the feeling among them that they’re living in an era of collapse. Yet at the same time, their presence, their energy, their gaze and their wonder when they were looking at the ruins of Pompeii — in some of their cases, that put me in a position of being obligated to feel hope.

THE FILMMAKING

There were two of us [me and Pierre Mazoyer] as directors of photography. On the film, we shared that work. On the one hand, I wanted to hold the camera. I wanted to think in the image because that’s my place and my tool, and it’s where I feel good — but I realized that with 20 actors and actresses, it was work that I wasn’t going to be able to do alone. I asked a very close collaborator who’s done the color correction on all my other films, Pierre, to join me. We started with a very realistic documentary approach to the image. I put myself in situations that I couldn’t necessarily entirely control. We wanted to observe Naples, with its very specific light. There’s a tremendous amount of saturation in Naples, many layers — it’s actually quite a hard place to film. So we started by going down there, two or three of us, to film shots of the city and really immerse ourselves in that environment.

And then little by little we directed the image toward something more lyrical. We allowed effects of color and movement into the film, and really we moved the film toward melodrama. That’s the trajectory of this film: We start with something very realistic, and then we move toward things that are more tragic and melodramatic. Douglas Sirk is someone that I was thinking about, and so with the costume designer and the gaffer, we really thought about bringing out specific colors. The final scene with Toni, set at the port, we really have a lot of color effects. We also allowed ourselves in the latter part of the film to have longer shots, not to cut as much, to have some sequence shots — to allow more movement into the image.

The whole time, we were keeping the same texture, which I think is quite close to celluloid film. That is really my sensibility: to move from something that’s very real and allow that to kind of slip. I also wanted to transpose the characters so that eventually they would take on this kind of ancient or antique power.

THE PREMIERE

Above all, things have been moving very fast. We finished the film only a few days before it premiered at Cannes, and indeed there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm around the film there, which was very moving for me, for the actors and actresses, for the crew — and then I went into working as a director of photography on a first feature film by another woman director. So I went straight from Cannes into prep for that film, and now we’re organizing my film’s release in various countries. I’m receiving a lot of messages. I’m certainly feeling all this excitement around the film. But I think that I don’t entirely realize what’s happening yet. And it’s been very helpful for me to be involved in the concrete, technical things of working on another film — it’s helped me keep a cool head. I haven’t quite measured what is going on with my own film yet.

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