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, her first major recognition at one of the three top European festivals after a decade of steady feature production. It also took the FIPRESCI Prize at the same festival and a European Film Award nomination for Best Director the same year.

It is the sixth feature in the continuous run Hansen-Løve began in 2007, all of them written and directed by her alone, and the first to centre on a protagonist outside her own approximate age range. She has said openly in interviews that the central role was inspired in part by her own mother, Laurence Hansen-Løve, a French philosopher and the author of several secondary-school philosophy textbooks, who still teaches in Paris.

Isabelle Huppert was sixty-three at the time of shooting. This was 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). Around Huppert are André Marcon as the husband, Édith Scob as the mother, in one of her last screen roles before her death in 2019, and Roman Kolinka as the former student. Denis Lenoir is the cinematographer. Alongside Goodbye First Love (2011) and Bergman Island (2021), it is one of the most accomplished examples of Hansen-Løve's distinctive, understated naturalism, and of the three it has the strongest lead performance.