Part of our Cannes 2026 coverage, updated daily from the festival.
OVERVIEW
A class of Parisian high school seniors travels to Naples for a six-day Latin trip, with visits to museums, ancient frescoes, and the ruins of Pompeii. Their teacher, Mme Mercier (Antonia Buresi), hopes the students will be moved by the art, as she once was, but other questions are on their minds. As they talk politics, desire, their past, and their future, the trip becomes less an educational journey than a confrontation with the lives already being drawn around them.
BACKGROUND
Marine Atlan is one of the busier French cinematographers of the last decade, with credits on multiple titles launched out of the same Cannes parallel sections where she now competes herself. La Gradiva is her first feature as director and comes with unusual support for a debut. The script won the 2024 Grand Prix du Scénario, and a Fondation GAN creation prize the same year, with backing from Arte France Cinéma, Italy’s Ministero della Cultura, and Eurimages. She shot for six weeks in Naples and Pompeii in spring 2025, sharing cinematography duty with Pierre Mazoyer so she could stay close to her cast.
THE REVIEW
As the group moves through the ruins of Pompeii, the city is used as more than a backdrop. The volcanoes that produce radical change, the figures of people frozen in time before their lives could reach a natural conclusion, all of it sits in parallel with a group of seventeen-year-olds on the edge of going to college, uncertain about what comes next.
The conversations in La Gradiva are unusually adult. The students argue about politics, sex, and revolt at length, the way French teenagers actually argue, and Atlan uses that argument as cover to track what is really happening to them: how desire, class, and inheritance are shaping decisions they have not yet learned to recognize as decisions. Removed from their routines, the group is pushed past its comfort zones into connections it would otherwise avoid, as the film builds a portrait of education at two scales: the place where social determinism becomes visible, and the institution that enforces it. There is no other option but to find your lane and fit in.
Working with a mostly non-professional cast that has clearly been chosen with great care, the film is patient and consistently engaging, finding its strongest arguments in the life of Toni, caught between a confusing pull toward his best friend, the one person he genuinely connects with, and a wider uncertainty about where he fits in the world. Even his more deliberate-looking decisions reveal how little room he actually has. Hooking up with an older Italian man looks like agency, but the man he chooses matches almost exactly what his friend had described earlier as attractive. Toni still goes through with it anyway in a deeply uncomfortable scene.
Shot with real intelligence by Pierre Mazoyer and Atlan herself, the camera holds the trip somewhere between nostalgia and suffocation. That same image system carries the film through its final stretch, when the documentary-like style gives way to melodrama. Atlan leads that shift with impr command, arriving at a tragic, genuinely devastating conclusion.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A film about teenagers that takes them seriously without ever romanticizing them, La Gradiva is one of Cannes 2026’s clearest discoveries and the most accomplished first feature in Critics’ Week. Atlan finds the tragedy under the school trip and uses it to build a smart, unsparing study of the cruel determinism baked into our society. Rich or poor, the strange kid or the popular one, all of them are given no time inside a system designed to enforce who they are allowed to be, and not all of us make it out.