BPM (Beats Per Minute)

Robin Campillo's BPM (Beats Per Minute) (120 battements par minute) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2017, losing the Palme to Ruben Östlund's The Square in a year so strong many critics regarded the BPM result as the moral runner-up. The film won the César for Best Film and was France's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. Campillo had been an editor and screenwriter for Laurent Cantet (The Class); this was his third feature as director and his most personal (Campillo himself had been an ACT UP activist in early-1990s Paris.

The film follows the Paris cell of ACT UP) the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, the international activist organisation founded in New York in 1987, as it confronts the French government, pharmaceutical companies and Catholic-conservative political establishment in the early 1990s. The activists' weekly meetings, in a Sorbonne classroom, are filmed in real-time procedural-democracy detail; the protests, including disruptions of pharmaceutical press conferences and chaining themselves to government building gates, are intercut with the romance and friendship that builds between two central activists, Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and Nathan (Arnaud Valois). Adèle Haenel and Antoine Reinartz play other central members of the cell.

The dance-floor sequences, set to early-1990s house music, are among the most charged in any recent European film, alternately joyful, mournful, defiant. The film's closing sequence has been written about repeatedly as one of the great political-cinematic gestures of the 2010s.