Pacifiction

Released in 2022, Pacifiction marked a significant pivot for Catalan auteur Albert Serra, whose earlier features (Story of My Death, The Death of Louis XIV, Liberté) had favoured period rooms and historical bodies. Here he turned to a contemporary subject, a French High Commissioner on the island of Tahiti, and entered the main competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, where the film was widely received as one of the festival's high points. It went on to win the Louis Delluc Prize and was named the best film of 2022 by Cahiers du Cinéma.

Benoît Magimel anchors the film as De Roller, a smiling, white-suited diplomat who navigates receptions, hotel bars and military rumours with practised charm. Shot at sea-level twilight by Artur Tort, the film luxuriates in long, ambient takes of palm-lined terraces and slow ocean swells, scored by drifting ambient cues. Around Magimel, Serra works largely with non-professionals from Tahiti, including Pahoa Mahagafanau as Shannah, lending the film a hushed, half-improvised cadence.

French critics were emphatic: Cahiers placed it at number one for the year, and Magimel won the César for Best Actor as well as the Lumière. International coverage was more divided, with some viewers finding the 165-minute runtime forbidding, but the consensus among Serra's defenders was that Pacifiction represented a new, more accessible mode for a director long associated with formal extremity. It now reads as one of the defining French art films of the post-pandemic decade.