The Kingdom

Julien Colonna grew up in Corsica in the years when the island's clan violence was at its height, and Le Royaume — his first feature — is drawn from that proximity rather than from research. It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2024, where it was nominated for the Caméra d'Or, the festival's prize for a debut, and went on to a nomination for the Prix Louis-Delluc for best first film. Ad Vitam released it in France that November; Metrograph Pictures took North America.

The film opens in the summer of 1995 with Lesia, fifteen, being driven out to a villa in the maquis where her father Pierre-Paul is holed up with his men. Colonna cast almost entirely from the island and largely outside the profession: Ghjuvanna Benedetti, in her first screen role, plays Lesia, and Saveriu Santucci her father. The result is a crime film with the texture of a landscape study — long stretches of heat, scrub and waiting, the genre machinery kept somewhere offscreen and the camera staying close to a girl reading a world she has never had explained to her.

Critics received it as one of the strongest French debuts of its year, praising Benedetti's watchfulness and Colonna's refusal of the operatic register that Corsican crime usually attracts. The Hollywood Reporter called it a superb Corsican mob movie; its American reviews were near-unanimous. It sits alongside a small body of work — Un prophète, A Perfect Day — that treats organised crime as an inheritance rather than a spectacle.