The Cannes Film Festival offers a wide range of programming featuring filmmakers and stories from around the planet. While the In Competition lineup of films competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or often takes center stage in the conversation, the sidebar sections can offer even more radical, experimental, and visionary work. Un Certain Regard, part of Cannes’ official selection, is one place to look.
This year’s Un Certain Regard was a tremendous example of lower-profile or first-time filmmakers announcing themselves with creative authority. Jane Schoenbrun, a unique voice on media and identity who previously broke onto the scene through Sundance with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), opened the festival section at Salle Debussy with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut, Club Kid, scored the biggest sale of the festival after being acquired by A24 for $17 million. Zachary Wigon premiered one of the more A-list-filled titles with Victorian Psycho, which stars Maika Monroe, Jason Isaacs, and Thomasin McKenzie.
The excitement of a festival section like Un Certain Regard lies in the programming freedom. In one moment, you can be watching the first Rwandan director to have a feature film in Cannes’ official selection (Ben’imana) and in the next, a coming-of-age story about teenage girls training to be mermaids (Titanic Ocean). Oftentimes, filmmakers you now regularly see programmed In Competition started in Un Certain Regard or another parallel Cannes sidebar, such as Director’s Fortnight (Quinzaine) or Critics’ Week (Semaine). It’s important and prescient to keep an eye on the standout filmmakers here in the early stages of their careers.
Out of any section of the 79th Cannes Official Selection, I found the most provocative and inspiring work in Un Certain Regard. Below are a few selections, in addition to my full review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma here.
El Deshielo (The Meltdown), dir. Manuela Martelli
One of Manuela Martelli’s smartest decisions in constructing The Meltdown is to filter its mystery through the perspective of a young girl who possesses fragments of information and truth but lacks the full understanding of its implications. Inés (Maya O’Rourke) quietly observes the world around her, while the audience gradually pieces together context clues about the broader political and economic tensions surrounding the disappearance of a skiing athlete in the Chilean mountains.
While we slowly recognize these additional factors at play that complicate the search, this is foreign to Inés. We see how the adults are more interested in self-preservation than justice, while Inés just wants her friend to return. The film excels at patiently unfurling these dynamics through subtle implication rather than exposing everything too soon. There are clear hints at the unspoken feelings of a country grappling with the aftermath of an authoritarian regime, and often, what is unsaid is as powerful as the text itself. At one point, the word “disappearance” arrives, and with it, the collective trauma of a society that experienced seventeen years of Augusto Pinochet as its leader.
The tiptoeing between an inquisitive young observer and a generation debilitated by authoritarian grief gradually heightens your suspicion about how the adults are manipulating the tragic circumstances. It’s a mystery that always feels on the verge of exposing a hidden truth, strengthened by a tremendous score. Martelli seamlessly glides between the hope and naivety of her protagonist and the sad reality of the adults around her.
Club Kid, dir. Jordan Firstman
The biggest headline acquisition of the festival, Club Kid, sold to A24 for $17 million after a bidding war amongst multiple vying studios, including Mubi, Focus Features, Searchlight, and Netflix. Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut delivers a genuine and heartfelt adult coming-of-age story about navigating responsibility after a life built on throwing parties and providing drugs. David (played by Firstman) is forced to sober up when he realizes, via an acquaintance from a decade ago, that the party promoter is a father to a 9-year-old son.
As a gay man and notable figure in the NYC queer club community, David’s first question is “how?” Turns out, the right cocktail of K, G, MDMA, and any other illicit letters of the drug alphabet can force just about anyone to trade debauchery for daddy (also known as growing up and doing government paperwork when life throws you a loop).
Club Kid strikes a contagious balance between feeling modern and gentle. There’s language used here (chopped, Kundle Jenner, Sniffany Haddish, etc.) that I’ve never heard in a theatrical feature film. But what makes the film especially effective is its balance of contemporary specificity and emotional maturity. The dialogue and social dynamics feel authentically rooted in queer nightlife culture, and Firstman approaches his characters and community with warmth, humor, and respect.
It manages to be funny in its heavy moments and heavy through the humor, exhibiting a confidence as both director and performer that gives the film an infectious energy, from its euphoric highs to its sobering emotional and legal realities. Beneath the comedy and club-scene energy is a thoughtful story about reinvention, and learning how to care for others when life suddenly demands it. Given A24’s financial position on the film and the overall strength of critical reactions, it’s likely far from the last time we’ll be hearing about Club Kid through its release and into awards season.
A Girl’s Story, dir. Judith Godrèche
Judith Godrèche’s Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story) is one of many coming-of-age stories to grace the Cannes official selection. In this case, Godrèche pulls from Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize-winning memoir of the same name. The centerpiece of the film is Annie (Tess Barthélémy), a 17-and-a-half-year-old girl who is thrust out of social and rural isolation into a camp counselor position where she’s exposed to new personalities, belief systems, and social systems while encountering problematic sexual experiences.
Rather than relying on hindsight revisionism, Godrèche’s adaptation immerses us within Annie’s world, embracing the fantasy of a teenage girl romanticizing attention from an older, socially powerful male figure. There’s no mincing words in Ernaux’s perspective on their abusive behavior to her, but while we are with Annie’s teenage point of view, her body suffers the consequences that it will take decades to reckon with.
I was moved by the honesty the film pays to the experience of first love, heartbreak, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with oppression, however irrational they may seem. The bookended framing device of Annie, a 75-year-old woman recounting her own story, is where it hits the hardest.
Uļa, dir. Viesturs Kairišs
The Latvian director Viesturs Kairišs returns after his 2022 Tribeca film, January. He presents at the Un Certain Regard, Ulya (Uļa), a portrayal of the legendary Soviet Basketball player Ulyana Semyonova. Shot on black-and-white by Wojciech Staroń, the film is a standard look at her trajectory from rural land to the communist sports league, when a member of her family tells the sports committee about this 6 foot 11 inch’ tall woman. From there, we follow her migration from the rural to the urban, while she struggles to adapt to her new reality.
Oddly enough, Karlis Arnolds Avots plays Ulya, while also co-writing the script with Livia Ulman and Andris Feldmanis. At first, Avots, a legendary sports pioneer in the USSR, feels out of place. The camerawork attempts to highlight the height difference between Ulya and the other girls, especially through the use of a fisheye lens. It imprints discomfort through the imagery, evoking what the character feels. Similarly, every dramatic choice seems calculated to create a sense of strangeness, trying hard to misplace Ulya within the community of the common height girls. Still, the film lacks more depth at its core to avoid the cartoonish quality in the performance.
It’s a fascinating story about the legendary player who became a two-time Olympic gold medalist in women’s basketball with the USSR. Kairišs aims to tell the story of a woman in the margins of society saved by a remarkable talent. Still, it feels like an effort that tries hard to dramatize, forgetting to develop the elements surrounding the character’s drama.
Uļa Review Courtesy of Pedro Lima
All the Lovers in the Night, dir. Yukiko Sode
Similar to many titles at this year’s Cannes, All the Lovers in the Night is contemplative and meditative to the extreme, but where that felt like a conflict with the characters and the text in some other examples, Sode Yukiko’s film thrives in its quiet solitude.
Our protagonist, Fuyuko (Yukino Kishii), is a freelance proofreader, and the manuscripts she edits add a flavor of job competency representation that is like visual ASMR. The world often feels overwhelming, and she finds comfort in her socially isolated, non-communicative lifestyle, despite her closest friend being extroverted in equal measure. As a deep-rooted introvert, Fuyuko speaks kindly and quietly to a neurodivergent character, encountering intimacy with caution and patience.
Her relative isolation begins to end when she meets a middle-aged man, Mitsutsuka (Asano Tadanobu), and their friendship is psychologically life-altering. Their conversations gradually develop a comfort in communication that’s so often elusive for her, until secrets and lies are revealed that alter their path. Even when their romantic partnership fizzles, you feel deeply drawn into her world and pursuit of whatever it is she desires.
The minimalist sensibility is drawn from Fuyuko’s limited perspective, and the film as a whole is embedded with the melancholy of a human being stepping outside their comfort zone only to find that letting in the outside world is just as painful.
The Full Official Selection of titles for Un Certain Regard at the 79th Cannes Film Festival is listed below, and you can read about the winners here.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, dir. Jane Schoenbrun
Elephants in the Fog dir. Abinash Bikram Shah
Iron Boy dir. Louis Clichy
Ben’imana dir. Marie-clémentine Dusabejambo
Congo Boy dir. Rafiki Fariala
Club Kid dir. Jordan Firstman
A Girl’s Story dir. Judith Godrèche
Uļa dir. Viesturs Kairišs
Titanic Ocean dir. Konstantina Kotzamani
La Más Dulce (Strawberries) dir. Laïla Marrakchi
El Deshielo (The Meltdown) dir. Manuela Martelli
Siempre Soy Tu Animal Materno (Forever Your Maternal Animal) dir. Valentina Maurel
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep dir. Rakan Mayasi
I’ll Be Gone in June dir. Katharina Rivilis
Words of Love dir. Rudi Rosenberg
Everytime dir. Sandra Wollner
Victorian Psycho dir. Zachary Wigon
All the Lovers in the Night dir. Sode Yukiko
Ulysse dir. Laetitia Masson
Article Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Still from ‘Club Kid;’ Courtesy of Festival de Cannes