Things to Come

Mia Hansen-Løve's Things to Come (French: L'Avenir) won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016 — Hansen-Løve's first major recognition at one of the three top European festivals after a decade of consistent feature production. The film also earned the FIPRESCI Prize at the same festival and the European Film Award nomination for Best Director the same year.

The film is the sixth feature in Hansen-Løve's continuous run of features made between 2007 and the present, all of which she has written and directed alone, and the first to centre on a protagonist outside of her own approximate age range. Hansen-Løve has been outspoken in interviews about the central role being inspired in part by her own mother — Laurence Hansen-Løve, a French philosopher and author of multiple secondary-school philosophy textbooks who continues to teach in Paris.

The lead, Isabelle Huppert, was sixty-three at the time of shooting; this is the first of several Hansen-Løve productions to centre on an older female protagonist (her later One Fine Morning in 2022 pairs Léa Seydoux with the late Pascal Greggory in a similar generational structure). The supporting cast pairs Huppert with André Marcon (the husband), Édith Scob (the mother, in one of her last screen roles before her death in 2019) and Roman Kolinka (the former student). Cinematography is by Denis Lenoir. The film is widely cited as one of the most accomplished examples of Hansen-Løve's distinctive understated naturalism, alongside Goodbye First Love (2011) and Bergman Island (2021).