Rust and Bone

Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone followed A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2009 and cemented his standing as one of France's most powerful working directors, and it reunited him with his regular co-writer Thomas Bidegain. They adapted two stories from Craig Davidson's 2005 collection of the same name, a Canadian cult book, and moved the action from Davidson's Niagara to the south of France. Most of it was shot around Antibes, Cap d'Antibes and Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts play the leads, and both performances are as physical as the title suggests. The film earned Cotillard a Golden Globe nomination, won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language, and received nine César nominations, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Cotillard) and Best Supporting Actor (Schoenaerts), with Schoenaerts winning Most Promising Actor. It also competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2012, the year Haneke's Amour won.

Stéphane Fontaine, Audiard's regular cinematographer (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Dheepan), shot it, and Alexandre Desplat wrote the score. The orca sequences were filmed at Marineland Antibes, an animal park that closed permanently in early 2025 amid French legislation banning cetacean captivity. Those images are now a historical record of an institution that no longer exists, which gives them a strange, unplanned weight.