The Worst Ones

Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret came out of casting and workshop work with non-professional children, and their first feature won the top prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022. It is drawn directly from that experience: a film about a film crew arriving on a housing estate in Boulogne-sur-Mer to make exactly the kind of picture the two directors used to staff.

Mallory Wanecque and Timéo Mahaut lead the four children cast by the fictional production, with Johan Heldenbergh as the Belgian director whose good intentions are never quite examined. The film keeps two frames running at once — the shoot, and the estate the shoot is borrowing — and the tension sits in the gap: what a child performs, what a director extracts, and who goes home afterwards to which building.

It holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes across 27 reviews and a César nomination for Best First Film. The register is warm rather than accusatory, which makes the critique land harder; Akoka and Gueret are not disowning social realism so much as asking it to account for its methods. Their follow-up, Summer Beats, premiered at Cannes in 2025.