To coincide with the excellent New York Film Festival, now in its 64th edition, we’re spotlighting two new exciting French directors whose solo-directorial debuts and Cannes breakouts are featured in this year’s Main Slate: Marine Atlan and Emmanuel Marre.

Atlan’s La Gradiva premiered in Cannes’ Critics’ Week to rave reviews this year and received its Grand Prize; the film details a group of teens’ misadventures while on a school summer trip in Pompeii. Sophisticated in design and attentive to the desires of its adolescent ensemble, La Gradiva builds upon the tender exploration of youth laid out in Atlan’s previous directorial effort: the 57-minute Daniel.

Her featurette follows the eponymous 10-year-old boy as he wanders about his eerie schoolhouse while his classmates rehearse a choreographed performance and the school’s staff prepares for an alarming drill. Somewhere along the way, Daniel stumbles upon his classmate Marthe and the two experience a tender but troubling encounter. This moment, staged as if it were taking place in an enchanting dimension all of its own, is illustrative of Atlan’s skills as a visual storyteller. Not only is she a preternaturally talented director, but she has also made a name for herself as a sought-after cinematographer whose contributions to films like Louise Hemon’s A Girl in the Snow as well as Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi’s Jessica Forever set her apart from her peers; moreover, it’s also worth noting that she has acted as a DP on all of her directorial endeavors thus far.

“A classroom is a microcosm of society: you have the trendy kids, the class stars, the ones who are somewhat sidelined… I find that it mirrors the way society is organized—the dynamics of dominance and power, who speaks up and how.” MARINE ATLAN

Atlan’s interest in educational settings have focused her films around children and teens. In both Daniel and La Gradiva, she immerses herself in the impulses, ideas, and emotions of her youthful cast, letting their effervescent qualities guide her scripts. Inspired by films like André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours, Atlan grapples with the seriousness of life’s early defining moments, representing these junctures as sources of true discovery and devastation.

Marine Atlan is a French cinematographer, director and screenwriter. She studied at La Fémis and has worked as a DP on a wide range of acclaimed new releases from the upcoming generation of French filmmakers. She directed her first short film, Green Romances, in 2016. Since then, she has continued directing while working on increasingly ambitious projects as a cinematographer.

Daniel and La Gradiva were both produced by bathysphere, a Paris-based production company with “the belief that audiences are waiting for ambitious, unusual and unprecedented experiences.” They have also produced films by Guillame Brac, Arthur Harari and Virgil Vernier.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.