La Gradiva

Marine Atlan came to directing through cinematography, and her debut feature La Gradiva shows that training in its painterly, tactile images. It premiered in 2026 at the 65th Semaine de la Critique, the Cannes parallel section devoted to first and second features, where it won the Grand Prix, the section's top award, and it went on to a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a French and Italian production.

The premise is simple, or looks it: a group of French secondary-school students travel to Naples to see Pompeii, the city and its inhabitants frozen by Vesuvius. Against that backdrop of preserved ancient bodies Atlan stages a coming-of-age story of adolescent desire and curiosity, and of the first stirrings of adulthood. The title nods to Wilhelm Jensen's novella Gradiva and the Freudian reading it later inspired, and the film runs that current of awakening longing through its young ensemble, led by Antonia Buresi.

Critics responded to its sensuality and its formal confidence, and the Critics' Week Grand Prize marked Atlan out as one of the most promising new French directors of the year. French cinema has a long tradition of coming-of-age films, and La Gradiva earns its place in it as an unusually assured first feature, alert to the strange closeness of youth and ruin.